Elon Musk's quest to ditch the Twitter name and replace it with X continues after the social network picked up the coveted @X username. But despite some assuming that its previous owner would be in for a big payday, all they got was some merch and a promise of a meeting with someone at the company.
While not necessarily allowed by Twitter's terms of service, accounts have been known to change hands for cold hard cash over the years. Single-character names like @X are particularly sought after and Twitter's branding change could have made this account owner pretty rich. But Twitter just up and took the account instead.
"They just took it essentially – kinda what I thought might happen," the account's previous owner said in an interview following the loss of his username.
Free X
In an interview with The Telegraph, the previous @X owner said that he received an email from Twitter reminding him that the account was never his in the first place — it was always owned by Twitter and simply loaned out, as is the case with all of our usernames for that matter.
Gene X Hwang, a photographer in San Francisco, said that he'd been offered some merch by way of recompense, although it isn't clear what was on offer. A meeting with the company's management was also offered, but nobody has said what that was supposed to be about.
As for Hwang, he now has a new username to tweet from although it's fair to say that @x12345678998765 isn't quite as snappy as his old one.
Twitter's rebrand comes as Musk tries to turn the short-form messaging service into a WeChat-like everything app. If he gets his way we can expect Twitter to start offering in-app payments, improved video support, and more moving forward.
