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Elon Musk rebrands Twitter as 'X': His obsession with the letter goes back decades

Musk’s fascination with the letter can be traced back to the 1990s, when he launched a venture called X.com

Published: Mon 24 Jul 2023, 4:35 PM

Updated: Mon 24 Jul 2023, 4:37 PM

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Elon Musk. (AP File Photo)

Elon Musk. (AP File Photo)

Twitter has been rebranded with owner Elon Musk replacing the iconic blue bird logo of the social media platform with the letter ‘X’.

According to Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, ‘X’ is “the future state of unlimited interactivity” and it “will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”

Well, Musk’s fascination with the letter 'X' is not new and can be traced back to the 1990s.

In 1999, Musk launched a venture named X.com. The company started as an online banking and financial services platform and later merged with payment gateway PayPal.

In 2000, Musk announced that he had decided to step down as the CEO of X.com, reported CNET. Back then, he had said that the company was looking for a “superstar CEO”.

“One has to recognise where one's strengths lie. It's more interesting for me in the early stages of running a company, where the concentration is all on developing the product...I am not really interested in administration,” Musk was quoted as saying.

After the merger and Musk’s departure, X.com was rebranded as PayPal in 2001. A year later, when PayPal went public, it was bought by e-commerce company eBay for $1.5 billion, reported The Verge.

Musk had insisted that the company, which eventually became PayPal, be named X.com and even tried naming it X-PayPal. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better. But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name,” Musk had said, according to author Walter Isaacson who is writing a book on Elon Musk.

Years later in 2017, Elon Musk bought the X.com domain from eBay, saying that it had “great sentimental value for him”.

“Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back http://X.com! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me,” Musk’s 2017 tweet read.

The letter X also features in the name of Elon Musk’s son — X AE A-XII. The billionaire recently celebrated his 4th birthday.

It doesn't end here. Musk is the CEO of SpaceX. The company, which “designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft”, was founded in 2002.

And Musk’s Tesla launched Model X in 2015. It was also the “first SUV ever to earn 5-star safety ratings in every category and sub-category in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s tests,” as per the website.

Even before closing the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter in 2022, Musk had said, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”.

In a subsequent post, he had added, “Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong”.

Biographer Walter Isaacson has also touched upon Musk's fascination with "X.com" in his upcoming book, 'Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future'.

Isaacson, as a part of his long note on Twitter, shared a passage from the book which read, “Musk told me, even before he took control of Twitter, that he planned to rebrand it http://X.com and to try to make it a platform that would fulfil his original vision from 1999."

The author added that Musk texted him one morning and said, “I am very excited about finally implementing http://X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!”

Isaacson said that Musk told him he would turn Twitter “into the combination of financial platform and social network he had envisioned twenty-four years earlier for X.com”.

Earlier this month, Musk launched his artificial intelligence startup named xAI. According to the company’s website, its goal is to “understand the true nature of the universe”.

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