Twitter proprietor Elon Musk, apparently displeased with progress on rebranding the site as "X," would like everyone stop calling Twitter "Twitter." He was mad at Steven King, the author, refusing to call Twitter "X" — and got in a giggle at trans people's expense, too, saying that calling Twitter "Twitter" was "deadnaming."
"According to the New York Times, terrorists may be paying for blue check marks on Twitter (I refuse to call it X)," King wrote.
Musk accused King of "deadnaming" the platform, a term typically used to describe the act of referring to a transgender person by their former name without their consent. Musk attempted to ridicule King, writing, "Stop deadnaming X… Respect our transition," in response to King's tweet.
"@StephenKing Stop deadnaming \ud835\udd4f\n\nRespect our transition \ud83d\ude02"
Note how the unicode "𝕏" symbol (double-struck mathematical X) he uses tends to get mangled into a load of gibberish as soon as it leaves Twitter.
The reason people are still calling it Twitter is because it was there before him and will probably end up officially just Twitter again after he's gone. X is his weird thing: his startup was called X and he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X when he was briefly appointed as its CEO, a mistake quickly remedied by its board.
Previously: Musk gets fact-checked by Twitter community, engages in petty public spat
