Elon Musk said on Friday that monthly users of social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, reached a "new high" and shared a graph that showed the latest count as over 540 million.
Musk's post on X about the user figures comes as the company
goes through organisational changes and looks to boost advertising revenue
which has dropped in the recent month.
It is also the latest in a series of comments from X's
executives claiming strong traction in usage, after Meta Platforms launched a
direct competing platform called Threads on July 5.
Twitter had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022,
according to a statement made before Musk's purchase of the firm in October.
Musk posted in November that X had 259.4 million daily active users.
Since taking over, Musk has swiftly moved through a number
of product and organizational changes. The company rolled out the verified blue
tick as a paid service and has started sharing a cut of the ad sales with
select content creators on the platform.
In May, Musk named former NBCUniversal advertising chief
Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X, signalling that ad sales were a priority even as
the platform worked to increase the subscription revenue.
Musk said earlier this month that X's cash flow was negative
because of a nearly 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt
load, without offering details.
Meanwhile, Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be
complicated legally: companies including Meta and Microsoft already have
intellectual property rights to the same letter.
X is so widely used and cited in trademarks that it is a
candidate for legal challenges - and the company formerly known as Twitter
could face its own issues defending its X brand in the future.
"There's a 100 percent chance that Twitter is going to
get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who
said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already
cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.
Owners of trademarks - which protect things like brand
names, logos and slogans that identify sources of goods - can claim
infringement if other branding would cause consumer confusion. Remedies range
from monetary damages to blocking use.
Microsoft since 2003 has owned an X trademark related to
communications about its Xbox video-game system. Meta Platforms - whose Threads
platform is a new Twitter rival - owns a federal trademark registered in 2019
covering a blue-and-white letter "X" for fields including software
and social media.
Meta and Microsoft likely would not sue unless they feel
threatened that Twitter's X encroaches on brand equity they built in the
letter, Gerben said.
The three companies did not respond to requests for comment.
© Reuters
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