Peter Thiel, left, and Elon Musk, right, hold VISA credit cards with X.com’s company logo October 20, 2000. Paul Sakuma/AP
Elon Musk announced Saturday that he plans to rebrand Twitter, changing the bird logo to “X.”
The renaming is part of Musk’s long-held vision of creating an “everything app.”
Musk wanted X to be the name of a banking services site now known as PayPal.
This is a machine translation of an article by our US colleagues at Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor. We welcome feedback at the end of the article.
Elon Musk on Saturday announced plans to replace Twitter’s bird logo with an “X” — a nod to the CEO’s vision of creating an all-encompassing “everything app” that could include shopping and banking services, among other things.
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The domain X.com now redirects users to Twitter. Musk said a new “tentative” X logo will go live on Sunday. He didn’t respond to a Business Insider request.
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The potential new Twitter logo harks back to Musk’s early days as a tech entrepreneur, when he was 28 when he set out to start an online banking business in Silicon Valley in 1999. At that point, Musk founded and sold Zip2 — a company that provided software for newspaper travel guides — for around $341 million. Musk made $22 million from the deal.
With this money, his next project focused on banking services. The idea was to create an online tool for managing mutual funds, according to a 1999 Marketwatch article.
Elon Musk in Palo Alto, Kalifornien, am 7. August 2000.
Pauline Lubens/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images
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 spot: a coffee shop.
“There was an early evening when Elon, the other founders of the company … and I were sitting around a back room table at a long-defunct bar called 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, in early 1999, the intent was still to build a revolutionary full-service financial platform (credit card, mutual fund, and standard bank details in one place – imagine that! 🙂 ) and the question was whether to be Q, X, or Z dot com.”
According to Ankenbrandt, a waitress in the café had the last word. “Elon asked her opinion and she said she liked x.com,” Ankenbrandt wrote, “Elon banged the table and said, ‘That’s it then!'”
Musk bought back the X domain from PayPal in 2017
The former PayPal exec noted that the founders felt branding would be an issue because of the “pornographic connotations of the letter X.” “But that never happened given the company’s evolution,” she wrote. Ankenbrandt could not be reached for comment.
X.com was launched in late 1999. In 2000, the company merged with its competitor Confinity, co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. The name never caught on: After disagreements within the company, including over the name x.com, Musk was removed at the end of 2000. Thiel has been appointed as the new CEO.
Though problems with the name didn’t result in Musk’s dismissal — one of the internal points of contention was where the company’s servers should be moved — most employees weren’t as enthusiastic about the name as Musk was.
According to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, almost everyone at the company preferred the PayPal name. In 2001, x.com was renamed accordingly. Musk soon turned his attention to other ventures, including founding SpaceX and investing in Tesla. But after more than a decade, Musk has never let go of the name.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment sent over the weekend. In 2017, Musk bought the X.com domain from PayPal for an undisclosed sum. “I don’t have any plans right now but she has a lot of sentimental value to me,” Musk tweeted at the time.
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Eight years later, after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk officially merged his newly acquired social media company with a Nevada incorporated company called X Corp. “The purchase of Twitter is an accelerator for the creation of X, the app for everything,” Musk said in October 2022.
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The Twitter CEO said in a live forum that he envisions a service that “does it all – sort of Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, all rolled into one, with a great interface.”
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