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# In the beginning...
- URL: https://free-the-bird.ghost.io/in-the-beginning/
- Published: 2026-09-11T14:02:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T14:02:50.000Z
- Description: On July 24, 2023, I was a trademark attorney working from my basement in suburban Chicago. Then I checked Twitter.
- Author: Michael A. Peroff

It was a pretty normal day.

It was summer of 2023, and everyone was still getting used to a “post-covid” world. I had just started my own law practice at the time. I had been a practicing trademark attorney for almost 15 years, and I had recently decided to hang out my shingle on my own in suburban Chicago.

When I say it was “a pretty normal day”, I mean I spent the morning working on some client matters in my office in the basement of my house as was typical. I usually took a break around lunchtime, and so on July 24, 2023, I went upstairs to the living room to lay on the couch and check Twitter for a while.

As I was scrolling my feed, I saw the tweet – Elon Musk announced that his company, X Corp., was rebranding “Twitter” to “X”.

In that moment, I recall thinking that there was no way this could be true. When Mr. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it portended disaster for the social media platform that I was most comfortable using. As expected, and in the interim between his purchase of the company and the rebranding announcement, Mr. Musk had instituted a variety of reforms intended to change the overall direction of the Twitter platform. The decision to create an “everything app” called “X” meant that Twitter would cease to exist altogether.

This raised an interesting question: If X Corp. really did rebrand Twitter to X, what would happen to the Twitter brand and intellectual property portfolio? As a trademark attorney, I always recommend to a client that even if they don’t plan to continue using a particular trademark, it is worthwhile to take the basic steps to protect the mark because failure to do so could be catastrophic, meaning that a third party could potentially adopt the abandoned brand and attempt to resurrect it.

It was this question that kept bouncing around the room of my mind for the rest of the day. As much as I wanted to forget about it and get back to focusing on legal work, I just couldn’t shake the thought - if Mr. Musk was really serious about no longer using the Twitter brand, then X Corp. might not take the routine steps that the owner of a globally famous trademark portfolio would take.

I decided to call my brother Bryan and ask him what he thought about the idea. My brother Bryan is older than me and a trademark attorney as well. I asked him if he had seen the announcement about Twitter and then explained to him what I was thinking – I was considering filing a trademark application for the word mark “Twitter” because it might be possible that the trademark rights would become abandoned at some point in the future. He thought it was an interesting idea and worth pursuing.

I next called my father, Mark Peroff, who is a very accomplished trademark attorney and living and working in New York City and New Jersey, where I grew up. I repeated the same thing to him about Twitter and asked him what he thought. Somewhat surprisingly, he said that I should go for it and file the application. We agreed that it was worth a shot. The filing fee was only $250 per class, so I figured there wasn’t much lost if it didn’t go anywhere.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, I kept checking the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website to see if any new trademark applications for “Twitter” had been filed, but there wasn’t anything listed. I ultimately decided to sleep on it, but I checked the USPTO website one more time after midnight just to see if anyone had filed a trademark application. There were no results.

The following day, I decided to file a trademark application for the word mark Twitter covering “social media services” amongst other things.

And that, my dear reader, is where this story begins…