Elon Musk’s Twitter is now X.
Along with the destruction of the globally recognized Twitter brand and its iconic blue bird logo, the rebranding has also had an extremely messy rollout.

Then, of course, there was the switch of the official @Twitter handle to @x, a username that had already been registered by an active user.

Musk’s company also took the handle @xai from the Japanese user who originally registered the handle back in 2010. On July 12, Musk would go on to officially announce his new artificial intelligence company, xAI. That same day, xAI also launched a Twitter account using the handle @xai.

“My account was changed without permission,” reads an English-language translation of the post that the Japanese user published on X on Wednesday. “It seems that Elon Musk robbed me.”

When Mashable spoke to Gene X. Hwang, who originally registered the @x handle more than 16 years ago, Hwang explained that he found out his rare one-letter username was taken after receiving an email from the company after they had already taken it. In the email, the company also offered Hwang some merchandise and a meeting with the X team.

The Japanese user who originally had the @xai username tells Mashable that he was offered no such thing. In fact, according to the user, they didn’t even receive an email. They logged in to Twitter on Wednesday and noticed that their username had suddenly been changed to @xai_ or “xai” with an underscore at the end of it.

While xAI went live on July 12, the @xai handle could have potentially been transferred to Musk’s company in late June, according to Travis Brown’s analysis. The @xai handle was transferred to an account newly registered in May without any prior posting history that appears to have been setup specifically for that purpose.

Furthermore, it appears the company made another bizarre move in changing the Japanese user’s handle from @xai to @xai_. It seems they also changed another user’s handle, the user who originally had @xai_, who is now found at the handle @xai__1. (Note the two underscores in that second user’s new handle.)

Earlier this year, Platformer reported that shortly after Musk’s Twitter takeover, he requested that the company transfer the single-letter @e handle to him. Combine that story with what we now know about @x and @xai and it’s becoming clear that X users with rare, short usernames shouldn’t become too attached to their handles on the platform formerly known as Twitter.