Twitter’s new name wasn’t pulled out of a magic hat by Elon Musk. In truth, the letter X and the South African billionaire have had a very special, almost obsessive relationship for more than two decades.
X.com officially replaced Twitter several days ago. Symbol of the changes that the platform is undergoing and will continue to undergo, it is also a clue to the direction it should take in the months to come. And, to understand it, you have to look at the history of this brand, which shaped the career of Elon Musk.
A young South African full of ambition
If you’re an entrepreneur in the mid-90s and want to ride the wave of success sweeping through the tech industry, what would you do? This is the question asked by a young South African, Elon Musk, freshly landed in California. With his brother Kimbal, he will found Zip2 which, contrary to what its name might suggest to computer enthusiasts, aims to help companies develop on the web. The concept was not so bad, since the company was bought in 1999 by the giant Compaq for 305 million dollars. Shortly before the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, the young Musk pocketed 22 million dollars, enough to embark on a new, much more ambitious project.
A few months later, he founded what is considered one of the first online banks in the world: X.com. Why use this simple letter and not another more generic name? Because, according to the young millionaire, ” when people think of X, they think of a treasure “. If the idea does not convince everyone, he will not change his mind, even when it is pointed out to him that the letter X does not refer to the activity of his company at all. In reality, it is more reminiscent of a porn site. So at the start of his success storyhis stubbornness will end up bringing him some setbacks.
The curse of the letter X
In early 2000, the company headed by Elon Musk merged with its direct competitor, Confinity. The South African businessman becomes the main shareholder and CEO of the new entity, which naturally retains the X.com name. However, the latter does not inspire confidence in Internet users and employees increasingly report ” terrible, horrible emails because of its pornographic sounding. Musk remains on his positions, however, seduced by the sound of the letter X, and surely by the class of his e-mail address at the time, [email protected].
This situation will not last forever, because his teams and his collaborators are increasingly pressing him to abandon X in favor of another more popular name. Indeed, in its boxes, Confinity has another online payment service, more successful and very popular with sellers on e-commerce platforms: PayPal. The idea is then to give the company the name of its most promising service. Out of the question for Elon Musk, who believes that ” it would be like Apple being called the Mac “. For him, X must change the world of finance, become ” the Amazon of financial services and it must take precedence over everything else.
The board of directors of the company, headed by Peter Thield who is one of the co-founders of Confinity, embarks on an attempted coup against the South African businessman, then in the middle of his honeymoon. Back to the wall, it finally gave in and X.com became PayPal in 2001. Two years later, it was bought by the e-commerce giant of the time, eBay, for the modest sum of 1, $5 billion. This time, Musk pockets $175 million.
With this sum and his reputation as a successful entrepreneur, he embarked on a new, much more ambitious project. Disappointed by the American space agency, NASA, which he considers too soft, he decides to get into aerospace and creates one of the most essential companies in this sector today: Space… X. Elon has thus swapped his treasure map for a star map. And this time, it is the planet Mars that he marks with a gigantic X.
The return of the Musk
This is not the last adventure of Elon Musk to date, since he also launched an assault on the automotive industry with Tesla, and in search of… many other things with The Boring Company. In the meantime, the businessman-turned-billionaire seemed to have put his obsession with the letter X aside. the subject, giving it various and sometimes quite mysterious uses. Until this month of July.
Elon Musk, now owner of Twitter, has begun a major project to transform the company. It’s not just about making the social network profitable, but also about evolving it into something bigger, even gigantic. Little by little, the blue bird is moving away from its micro-blogging origins, and allows the publication of articles of several thousand characters, as well as job offers. In fact, the goal is for Twitter to become a super-app, like the Chinese giant WeChat. The platform must become essential to human beings, and for that, it must change its name. It becomes X.com, and Musk announces the integration of new financial services. There you go, the circle is complete.
Source : Mashable
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