Elon Musk revealed his intentions to replace Twitter’s bird logo with an ‘X’ on Saturday, alluding to the CEO’s goal of building an all-encompassing ‘everything app’ that would offer banking and retail services among other features. Users are now redirected to Twitter from the domain X.com.
The new design for Twitter brings to mind Musk’s earlier days as a computer entrepreneur when he was 28 and living in Silicon Valley with plans to build an online banking business in 1999. By that time, Musk had founded and sold Zip2, a business that offered newspapers city trip guide software, for around $341 million. Out of the transaction, Musk made $22 million. With that money, he launched his next business, which offered banking services. According to a Marketwatch story from 1999, the plan was to provide an online tool for managing mutual funds. (https://chacc.co.uk/)
What would this online service be called? According to Julie Anderson Ankenbrandt, a former PayPal executive, the name was born in a classic Silicon Valley setting: a café. “There was a night early on where Elon, the other founders of the company … and I sat around a backroom table at a long-defunct bar called the Blue Chalk (Cafe) in Palo Alto, trying (to) decide what the name of the company should be,” Ankenbrandt wrote in a 2016 Quora post. “At that point, early 1999, the intent was still to build a revolutionary full-service financial platform (credit card, mutual fund, and standard banking data all in one place – just imagine! 🙂 ) and the question at hand was whether to be q, x, or z dot com.”
Musk was fired in late 2000 as a result of internal conflicts, particularly those centered on the name
According to Ankenbrandt, a waitress at the café would have the final say. “Elon asked her what she thought, and she said she liked x.com,” Ankenbrandt wrote. “Elon pounded the table and said, ‘That’s it then!’” According to the former PayPal executive, the founders believed that branding would be problematic due to the “pornographic associations of the letter X.” Although it’s possible that Musk might actually like the negative association today. But given the company’s course, she added, “It really never came to that in the end.” Ankenbrandt was unavailable for comment. The business merged with Confinity, a rival that Max Levchin and Peter Thiel co-founded, in 2000. The x.com name was never adopted by the company; Musk was fired in late 2000 as a result of internal conflicts, particularly those centered on the name. Thiel was identified as the new CEO.
Although disagreements over the name did not result in Musk’s termination—one of the internal disputes concerned the location of the company’s servers—the majority of the staff did not share Musk’s enthusiasm for the name. Nearly everyone in the business favored the name PayPal, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”. Accordingly, x.com underwent a rebranding in 2001. Musk quickly left to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, among other businesses. But even after more than ten years, Musk clung to the name. An inquiry for comment that was made over the weekend received no response from SpaceX. For an undisclosed fee, Musk bought the domain name X.com from PayPal in 2017.
“No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me,” Musk tweeted at the time. Eight years later, after he purchased Twitter for $44 billion, Musk formally merged his newly-purchased social media company into a Nevada-incorporated entity called X Corp. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk said in October 2022. The Twitter CEO said in a live forum that he envisions a service that “does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface.”