The crux of the problem is Jones’ bankruptcy. A trustee is selling his assets to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. These assets include four X accounts associated with Jones, with a combined total of nearly 4 million followers. However, Musk’s hat is now in the ring as his legal team argues that these accounts are not actually owned by Jones to be sold.

X “is clearly the owner of the X accounts,” X’s attorney wrote in his objection filed Monday. “The trustee cannot sell, assign or otherwise transfer what he does not own or has no interest in.”

The implications for X – and Musk – couldn’t be more significant. A ruling against On the other hand, critics of Jones’ tireless, 12-year campaign against the families of young children murdered at school welcomed the July 2024 order that Jones pay damages. Jones spent years falsely denouncing the children’s deaths as a hoax and deriding the grieving families as “crisis actors.”

The objection of

A U.S. bankruptcy judge, Christopher Lopez, will decide the fate of Jones’ X accounts and whether they should be included in the liquidation of his assets as part of his bankruptcy.

Who owns an X account: a user or X?

In 2018, Twitter suspended Jones for “abusive behavior,” but Musk reinstated Jones’ account in December 2023 after polling users about whether he should do so. About 70% of users voted for Jones to be added back to the site.

“The people have spoken and so it will be,” Musk replied before restoring Jones’ account.

The Terms of Use of told Assets. “However, it is worth noting that some of these ownership rights and rights are shared with X to some extent.”

The terms – which a user must agree to in order to open an account – state that each user grants “a broad, royalty-free license to make its content available to the rest of the world and to enable others to do the same.”

That means that even though a user’s X account — and their posts — are technically their own intellectual property, “the actual rights they have over their content are quite limited,” Fletcher said.

“This is a very novel argument that X is making; We’ve never seen this before,” said Adam Weissman, an intellectual property attorney Assets.

A completely new argument emerges

The terms of service that apply to each social media platform always mention ownership, although each platform is different. With X, Weissman said, ownership refers to the actual content a user creates, not their account itself.

“There is a lot of talk about X being able to deactivate your account or temporarily remove access to it,” Weissman added. “But as far as I know, there is no explicit regulation as to who owns it.”

Over the summer, disputes arose between employees and the company over who owned a company social media account, Weissman said. But Weissman said he “never saw the argument that the platform is the owner.”

“This may be the first time this argument has really been addressed,” he said.

Regarding the Jones bankruptcy case in particular, if Musk and X somehow manage to establish ownership of the accounts, the new question will be: What does an account actually consist of?

“There are already terms and services in place regarding private and personal information within the account,” Weissman said. “So the difficult question will be: What does it mean to own the account? Where does it leave us? Your followers don’t belong to you – that’s obvious. So I’m curious to see what they actually mean by that.”

X’s involvement in Jones’ case seemed like a stalling tactic, Weissman said. “It’s like they’re throwing something at the wall to see what sticks.”

The terms of use suggest otherwise

Each platform’s terms of service explicitly state that the user owns their content in terms of copyright, Weissman said, although each uses its own specific language and grants licenses to use content in different ways.

On X, the license to use content is very broad, Weissman said. “They have a lot of latitude in what they can do with your content without asking your permission. However, this is not the same as the account. As I recall, the terms and conditions do not specifically state who the account owner is.”

Fortunately, a regular user who isn’t trying to become an influencer or build a large following hardly needs to worry about these details.

“Most people who aren’t already making money on their account don’t think about it,” Weissman said. “But anyone trying to make money from the platform needs to think about what they put out there because these platforms can turn around and use the content without their permission.”

In fact, content creators will often be thrilled with the additional coverage, even if it is a legal overreach. “A lot of times it’s not exploited to the extent that people are upset,” Weissman said. “But the possibility was always there.”

Subject to the Terms and Conditions of What’s Yours, You Own Your Content (and your included audio files, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).” But “by submitting, posting or displaying any Content on or through the Services You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download and distribute such content in any media or method of distribution now known or later developed for any purpose.”

“I find it interesting that Grok, X’s AI tool, responded that X owns the accounts,” said David Carstens, an IP attorney in Plano, Texas Assets. “But reading through the X terms of service, it seems much more likely that the user owns his account.”