Overstock is now Bed Bath & Beyond and Bed Bath & Beyond is now Overstock. If that sounds confusing, it’s really not. As the Washington Post reports, what really happened here is that Overstock bought Bed Bath & Beyond’s intellectual property for a nice fire sale price of $21.5 million. Now, why would Overstock make that purchase?

The simplest answer is provided by Overstock CEO Jonathan Johnson who said, “We thought we had a good operating model but a bad name; we thought Bed Bath & Beyond had a great name but a bad operating model.” Mr. Johnson was being polite because Bed Bath & Beyond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, so their operating model was obviously catastrophically bad.

As for why Overstock’s brand needed an overhaul, it’s complicated. The company original business model was based on selling liquidated merchandise from failed companies and neither consumers nor suppliers find that association appealing. Then there’s the lunatic flameout of their founder Patrick Byrne and his involvement in Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt. Here’s a reminder:

With a career-ending affair with a Russian agent, attacks on a professional nemesis he named “the Sith Lord” and constant references to a “deep state,” Patrick Byrne often pushed conspiracy theories and found himself ensnared in controversy — long before the former chief executive of online retailer Overstock promoted Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a rigged election.

Byrne, one of corporate America’s most vocal proponents of the former president’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, will be the latest figure from Trump’s orbit to meet with House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The longtime cryptocurrency advocate is scheduled to meet privately with the committee on Friday…

…The former furniture industry executive joined lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, as well as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, days after the electoral college certified that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. While many of Trump’s legal advisers had accepted that he had lost the election, Byrne and others were pushing an idea that the president could use the National Guard to seize voting machines.

So, Overstock felt like their name was holding them back and found a new name that still rates pretty well despite the bankruptcy. It cost them virtually nothing, especially when compared with the costs and uncertainty of trying to build a new brand from scratch.

I think we can all agree that this is a savvy and sensible move by Overstock, but what does it tell us about Elon Musk’s decision to voluntarily do away with the Twitter brand and its friendly little blue bird? The company is now called ‘X.’ To refelect this, the bird is gone, replaced with a white X on a black background.

You youngsters out there may not realize it, but we used to use the word ‘Xerox’ as a verb to describe making paper copies of things. That’s because every office had a copying machine and Xerox had the biggest market share. Think about how much of an advantage that gave to Xerox over other copier-making companies.

Today, there are a lot of people who will say, “hand me a Kleenex” when they want a tissue. That’s free advertising and gives Kleenex a big advantage over competitors like Puffs and Scotties.

Everyone knows what a “tweet” is. People have trouble using a different word to describe posts on similar platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. I think Trump wants people to call those posts “Truths” but they will still say, “Did you see what Trump tweeted on his shitty social media site?”

That’s a demonstration of the cultural penetration of the Twitter brand, and it’s worth much more than the $21 million Overstock paid for the Bed Bath & Beyond name. People don’t know what ‘X’ is even though it’s suddenly showing up as an icon on people’s tablets and phones where the bird used to be.

I could go deeper into principles of branding, comparing the inviting and happy bird to the austere and off-putting X, but I’m not pretending to be an expert in marketing. I’m just saying, it is completely nuts to throw away a brand like Twitter. People are not going to say “I just posted an X.” You can’t even pronounce the plural version of X without people thinking you’ve been divorced multiple times.

The only thing defensible about this decision of Musk’s is that he destroyed Twitter for the users, so he really doesn’t deserve to keep the name. Calling Musk’s enterprise “Twitter” was misleading. Giving it a new name clarifies things.

But the shareholders must be pulling their hair out because this is the worst kind of corporate sabotage. It’s submental. Kleenex changing its name to ‘K’ would be a million times less stupid, but still monumentally stupid nonetheless.