Twitter took control of the @X handle without paying the owner

Twitter, now known as X, has taken control of the @X handle without compensating its owner.

The owner of the handle, Gene X. Hwang, was informed of the company’s intention to take over the handle this week by email. The message told Mr. Hwang that the handle was affiliated with X Corp. and would be transferred to the newly named company, even though he created the tag before Twitter’s rebranding.

According to the email, Mr. Hwang could choose any inactive username for his new handle and all his data would be transferred. He was also offered a collection of X-themed merchandise and a tour of X’s facilities. As of Thursday, his handle is @X123456788765.

High-value handles usually go for thousands of dollars, but X is not legally obligated to pay.

“It would have been nice for them to compensate for it since it did have a lot of value to me, but things are what they are,” Mr. Hwang told TechCrunch. “Maybe I should ask for the bird from the sign since they were dismantling that yesterday too.”

The decision is one of the choices amid Elon Musk’s Twitter rebranding effort. This week, Twitter officially became X. The site, while still asking users to tweet and is still called twitter.com, features a sleek X logo. But Twitter didn’t secure intellectual property rights to X and now has to fight off Meta and Facebook for the right to several X-related trademarks.

Police stopped the dismantling of the large Twitter bird outside its San Francisco headquarters last week due to the company not clearing it with the city.