- Twitter rebranded to X this week and has begun changing its official accounts to match.
- One user had already registered the username @x — but he said the company abruptly took it from him.
- The owner of the handle, Gene X Hwang, told Insider that he would have been willing to trade it.
The original owner of the handle, Gene X Hwang, told Insider that he received an email about the handle change and that he was given the much longer handle @x12345678998765. Hwang said that he had owned the @x handle since 2007 and that he had since generated more than 53,000 followers on the social-media site.
Hwang, a photographer from San Francisco, said that he'd been open to trading the handle but that X didn't provide him with any financial compensation for his trouble.
"When it all started happening, I thought maybe something cool would come out of it," Hwang said. "In a way, it was kind of like the fantasy of a winning lottery ticket. You buy the ticket, and there's some hope that maybe you'll win something, but you also know that's probably not going to happen." Hwang said people had told him that he could get a Tesla Model X or a ride on a SpaceX rocket out of it.
"Some amount of money or compensation doesn't seem like it would be too big a deal for them," he said. "I definitely would have accepted something for it, but I also wasn't trying to extort money or anything like that."
The email from X, which was viewed by Insider, said that the user handle was "affiliated with X Corp" and that Hwang had been given a new handle as a result. His posts and followers had also been transferred to the new account. The Telegraph was the first to report on the issue.
The company told Hwang that he would be provided with "X merch and an exclusive visit to X's HQ to meet members of our team." Though, Hwang said that he had already visited the company's headquarters years ago with a friend and that he would be more interested in Twitter-related merch than X-branded material.
The social-media company's owner, Elon Musk, announced that the company was rebranding over the weekend and that it would ditch its iconic blue-bird logo for a simple "X."
As well as continually evolving its new logo, the company has been changing the names of its official accounts on the platform. Though, the company's main account took a bit longer because Hwang had already registered @x.
Social-media users began noticing the then-private account @x had changed its bio to "!!!" and "Oh" as the new logo began popping up on the site earlier this week.
"He must be scared for his life," one tweet with nearly 200,000 likes read.
"All's well that ends well," Hwang tweeted Tuesday night after his account was changed.
In the past, users on the site formerly known as Twitter have sold their handles for thousands of dollars on the black market. The practice violates the company's username-squatting policy, which doesn't allow users to buy and sell handles on the site. The owner of another single-letter account, @n, told Gizmodo in 2014 that they were $50,000 for the name before they were hacked and lost the account.
Hwang wrote on his blog that he had faced a similar hack in 2014 but that he eventually regained control of @x.
One company account yet to change its name is @TwitterMovies — which could be linked to the fact that several users have joked that the name X sounds more like a porn website.
What's more, taking over the @x handle appears to be the least of X's rebranding woes. The company's rival, Meta, also holds the rights to a trademark for the "X" logo — an issue that could cause more headaches for Musk's company. And the company's efforts to switch out its Twitter sign at its headquarters were foiled by police on Monday night after the San Francisco Police Department said that officers had responded to "a possible unpermitted street closure" that was later determined not to be a police matter.
A spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Source: businessinsider
