Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. Since then, he has transformed the platform with some big changes. The latest change is rebranding Twitter to X and replacing the iconic blue bird logo. This rebrand is being considered as a part of Musk’s vision to create an ‘everything app’. Just a few days ago, Musk announced a new AI based company called xAI.
Musk acted as CEO of Twitter (now X) until he stepped down in June 2023 and was replaced by Linda Yaccarino, who recently announced this historic rebranding publicly.
This announcement made us curious about the meaning behind this new name- ‘X’, and what we came to know is super interesting! For those who don’t know, Elon Musk’s relationship with X.com is very old. X.com was an online bank co-founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999. Within 2 months, X.com had over 200k signups. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity Inc. After the merger, there were disagreements around the X.com name. Soon, Thiel was named the new CEO of this company, and the merged entity was renamed PayPal, whereas X.com used to redirect to PayPal.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for a whopping US$1.5 billion, and in 2015, PayPal became an independent, publicly traded company. But this didn’t end Musk’s love for the name ‘X’. In 2017, he bought the X.com domain from PayPal, and in 2017, X.com was relaunched. Interestingly, the website had nothing in its source code except the letter “X”.
Later, Musk directed X.com visitors to ‘The Boring Company’s website in order to increase the sales of the hat.
If you notice, the letter X is also present in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla Model X.
Now, after taking over Twitter, Musk has once again proved his vision for X.com with such a bold move! Social media users have shared mixed opinions over the same.
It would be interesting to see if Musk’s risks pay off.
What are your thoughts on Elon Musk’s obsession with ‘X’?
