X Corp issues cease-and-desist to third-party tool builder, fueling accusations of corporate bullying

Last month, a solo developer named SELO, who posts on X as @seloesque, woke up to a cease-and-desist letter from X Corp that shut down two tools he had spent months perfecting. The projects, X-Graphs and XGlobalRank, gave users sharper ways to search profiles and see who was really getting attention on the platform. Elon Musk sat at number one on the global leaderboard, Grok at number two, and thousands of people were paying a few bucks a month for extra stats.

SELO never hid what he was doing. He pulled the data straight from X’s public feeds, not some back-door scrape, and he talked openly with platform employees about the tools. Early November looked promising: he flew through three job interviews at xAI, showed off his work, and left feeling like he had impressed the team. Then the trail went cold. No follow-up, no feedback, nothing.

Two weeks later an X staffer slid into his DMs with a three-hour ultimatum: kill the projects or face suspensions and worse. On November 17, the official letter arrived, accusing his company, Curlysoft LLC, of illegally taking “X Data” and selling access to it. SELO pulled both sites offline the next day and started refunding subscribers. If you visit xglobalrank.com right now, you’ll still see the takedown notice plastered across the homepage.

The backlash kicked into high gear when screenshots surfaced of a now-deleted post from Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, mocking SELO after the shutdown.

Days later, on November 27, Musk announced a brand-new Grok-powered ranking system for posts in the Following tab.

Threads calling it a rip-off racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and the original exposé from @IntCyberDigest is sitting at 1.6 million impressions and counting.

SELO posted the full paper trail himself (the DMs, the legal letter, everything) and made it clear he never wanted a fight. He just wanted to build something useful and maybe land a gig. Instead, he got silence, then a legal sledgehammer. X has every right to enforce its rules, but the way this played out (praise one minute, ghosting the next, then a public takedown) has left a sour taste for a lot of developers who still remember the 2023 API price hikes that killed most third-party clients.

No lawsuit has been filed, and SELO says he’s moving on. But, in a post from earlier today, SELO did mention that he’s “reverse engineering XChat rn.” So maybe, just maybe, he’s toying with X to see where they draw the line. Stay tuned to know how this saga will end!