New Twitter launches, says Musk’s X gave up the name - Ars Technica

Judge hasn’t ruled on X Corp’s preliminary injunction, but Operation Bluebird plows ahead

Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now.

“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”

As Ars reported in December 2025, Coates and his coterie believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company’s name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned.

Musk’s decision, they claim, created the opening for Operation Bluebird to claim Twitter’s trademarks.

But Musk’s X Corporation quickly sued Operation Bluebird late last year and asked a federal judge in Delaware to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent a new version of Twitter from launching.

However, in an April 2026 hearing, US District Court Judge Colm Connolly gave a tentative ruling from the bench that X seemed to have given up intellectual property claims over the word “tweet” and the Twitter bird logo—and possibly even on the word “Twitter” as well. The judge has yet to issue a written order.

For Coates, who serves as Twitter’s new general counsel and previously worked in the same role during the pre-Musk era, the judge’s words were enough to serve as a green light.

“It’s our opinion that X has abandoned its rights on the Twitter and tweet trademarks,” he said.

Still, the new Twitter takes great pains to put daylight between itself and the previous iteration of Twitter.

“Operation Bluebird, Inc. picked up the name X Corp. walked away from and is rebuilding it on trust, in your browser at twitter.now,” it states prominently on its website. “We are not X, and we are not affiliated with X Corp.”

Neither the X Corporation, nor Elon Musk, nor Andrew Mayo, one of X’s attorneys, immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

Twitter.now, still in its nascent stage, only has hundreds of users for the time being. The social media network looks and feels much like the Twitter of old and many of its offshoots—it has replies and retweets.

A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.

Coates has been testing Vera in recent days by posting obviously false messages, like “George Washington was our second president.”

“Our first goal is to see if we can truly bring back a town square that’s safer and less harmful,” he said.

“We say freedom of speech and not freedom of reach. We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that’s not financially locked into that viral content that’s harmful or inaccurate.”

Josh Gerben, a Washington, DC-based trademark attorney who has been closely following this case, told Ars that while Operation Bluebird may have a “workable legal theory” that X Corporation has abandoned the Twitter trademark, it’s not an open-and-shut case.

“I would say that there’s an element of chutzpah to do this, and they’re going to get the best fight that X has,” he said.

“It was one thing to file the trademark application; now that they’ve launched, there will be another response from [X Corporation],” he said. “They’ve really upped the ante now. It’s a really interesting escalation of the case. Go put another round of popcorn in the microwave!”