Tech giant Elon Musk has demanded that Luxembourg give up the x in its name, saying that the letter is a registered trademark and belongs to him and his social media platform.
“Are your X are belong to us,” he said in a post, informally known as a xeet, formerly known as a tweet. The wording is a reference to an early 2000s meme. “That means you, Luembourg.”
A government spokesperson attempted to respond via X, formerly known as Twitter, but realized that Luxembourg’s accounts had already been locked pending the name change.
“The x may seem trivial to you, but it’s been a part of us for a long time,” the spokesperson later posted on Facebook, tagging Musk on what first appeared to be an official page but later turned out to be fake. “Our nation-branding strategy is built around it.”
Luxembourg then solicited support from other countries with an x in their name.
The only response came from Mexico which said that it had already changed its name to Mejico, which is phonetically identical.
Musk later agreed that “deleting” the letter, as he called it, may indeed complicate things for the Grand Duchy, but he contends that the country “should have anticipated this when I bought Twitter on a whim and renamed it X, much as average poor mortals get a cat named Pinocchio from an animal shelter and change its name to Tiger the second they get home.”
One exasperated Grand Duchy official, foreseeing the inevitable, has already begun to make a list of things that will need to be changed following the omission of the letter x.
“All of our official letterhead, the signs on our ministers’ office doors, and road signs including those in bordering countries,” she said. “All those souvenir pens and mugs. The giant letters on the steps in front of the Philharmonie. Oh my god.”
Member’s of Musk’s DOGE team, some of whom looked as if they had not yet begun to shave, arrived in Europe on Tuesday with thousands of liters of Tipp-Ex fluid, intent on initiating the process themselves.
However, it turned out that they had erred and gone to Lichtenstein instead. In a show of solidarity, Liechtensteiners informed the DOGE team that Luxembourg was “a thousand kilometers due east.” The team was last seen hitchhiking through Slovakia.
Several members of Luxembourg’s Chamber of Deputies have already expressed their dissatisfaction with the name Luembourg. While a few members have insisted that the new English, French, and German names should simply be Lëtzebuerg as it is in Luxembourgish, other suggestions include LOLZembourg, Licksembourg, and even Luckybird.
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Originally published by RTL Today
