Elon Musk’s 25-year-old obsession with ‘ X ‘ explains what he did on Tflix

Elon Musk put so much of his wealth into X.com he had only $ 4 million in the world.

This wasn’t the 21st century X.com. this was 1999, the peak of the dotcom boom. Musk had just sold his first startup, a city guide website called zip2 — pc maker Compaq loved it for its search engine. Musk earned $ 22 million in the deal. He did not play it safe with his winnings. The 28-year-old South African immigrant spent $ 18 million building a rather less modest idea. X.com it would be an online hub for any type of financial transaction in the world.

What does the ” X ” have to do with money? When people think of X, musk insisted, they think of treasure. They think ” X marks the spot.”Musk never wavered in this belief, not even when he showed evidence that what most people really think about it when you see it. “X.com” it is…porn. His blind love led to a coup in the boardroom that ousted him as CEO, and eventually dropped the name X — replaced by PayPal.

If you, like most of us, are still puzzled about Musk’s ignominious decision to delete the name Tantanitter (and its multi-billion dollar brand identityscratching a big X on it, the basic history of the PayPal Mafia is where you start. There are striking parallels between that era, now documented in many best-selling books, and this one. It’s all there: disdain for beloved brands; impulsive decisions that alienated even allies; the grand vision of the “everything app” style; and perhaps more telling, how investors would jump every time Musk talked about it.

That last part may be what Musk is now relying on: a desperate bid to spark curiosity so that new investments dig the company formerly known as Tantanitter out of its deepening financial hole. Or the name change could be the result of a quarter of a century of simmering over the loss of X.com which Musk bought back from PayPal for “sentimental” reasons in 2017. Either way, there is reason to think that the blow in this cautionary tale of arrogance will strike a second time.

The Story Of Muskian X

To be fair to Musk, he wasn’t a dummy at the time. The latest bestseller to tell the story, Jimmy Soni The Founders: The Story Of PayPal And The Entrepreneurs Who Formed Silicon Valleyhe is not ashamed of his lack of Elon Muskthe 2017 biography of hagiography. But also Founders it paints a picture of Musk as an extremely hardworking 20-something whose fascination with finances allowed key insights into the messy process that created PayPal.

For example, Musk took an early lead in the online payment war between X.com and his rival, a startup called Confinity that worked from the same Palo Alto office space.

Not only was Musk quicker to recognize the value of being able to pay by email (instead of relaying it between Palm Pilots, the concept originally touted by Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel), but he paid X.com users $20 in sign up, while Thiel paid $10. Bleeding money from this competition, the companies were forced to merge in 2000 under X.com Musk would be the company’s largest shareholder.

Musk had it all at this point. Especially after X.com it’s the first, lesser-known coup in the board room. This was where Musk ousted his hand-picked CEO, Intuit veteran Bill Harris, after Harris had done all the hard work of the merger. Musk took on the role of CEO. But apparently, he didn’t realize that the most valuable thing he owned was a name. The name for Confinity’s payment app, the name eBay sellers wanted: PayPal.

Founders it goes into depth in creating the PayPal name, and it’s worth staying on point. Thiel’s team hired a professional naming company that considered hundreds of options, checked to see if they would infringe trademarks, and came up with a shortlist that included MoMo, cachet, and PayPal. It took the team a while to come to the latter, but once they realized it could be a verb — “just give it to me” — they never looked back.

While X.com gathered 200,000 users shortly after its launch, none of those users said “just X it for me.”Worse, the pornographic name had attracted what an early female X.com employee called” so many terrible, terrible emails.”

Musk didn’t care. Not only was he in love with the way he sounded (and with his personal freshness) [email protected] email address), he thought that “PayPal” was too restrictive. “It would be like Apple calling itself the Mac,” Musk told Jimmy soni Founders. X was going to change the financial world, so he had to come before everything.

The payment product at the United company, he decreed, would be called X-PayPal. According to Max Chafkin, author of the biography of Peter Thiel KontrariMusk “asked the marketing department to rework the PayPal logo to include an X,” and was “starting to completely remove the PayPal name.”

Team Thiel fought hard against X. a series of focus groups revealed “again and again, the theme of’ oh my god, I wouldn’t trust this website, it’s an adult website.'” X.com Marketing Manager Vivien Go told Soni. “It’s kind of hard to refuse when people are constantly saying, almost with the same words, ‘I just wouldn’t believe this. That sounds really mysterious.'”

Musk was convinced. He dealt with the problem of faith then as now, ignoring it. Also then as now, he insisted that engineers rewrite the code base his way, and seemed unaware of the amount of money the company was burning. It was all in the service of a higher vision of X, which he described to eager investors as the “Amazon of financial services.”

All this led to the company’s second board coup, the one where Thiel called a meeting to take down his old foe while Musk was on a delayed honeymoon with his first wife, Justine. That was cool-but Musk’s instinct was to cover it up, save face and keep pushing X.com as the name of the company, even if he could not win on the question of the PayPal product.

Check out this CNN report from 2001-in which Musk makes it sound like it was his decision to retire and headlines the company “X.com it’s now called PayPal.”

Stop trying to make X happen

Why Musk still thinks he can make X happen, and do it by replacing another iconic brand a quarter of a century later, it remains a mystery. The world has moved forward. The online payment networks of Apple Pay and Google Pay, not to mention Square, are all that most consumers will ever need.

The Apple product hasn’t been developed outside of China; starting in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg tried to copy the company’s products through Facebook Messenger, WeChat has a much wider audience than T WeChat ever had, and it failed.WeChat.

Musk did not offer details on the upcoming X service, and no answer to the question WeChat. When challenged by tantanetimer employees in November about the “fundamental differences” between Tantanetimer and the WeChat, according to Neflix York TimesMusk said the questioners didn’t know what they were talking about and continued.

But it seems more likely that Musk, surrounded by a bubble of yes-men like X.com veteran David Sacks doesn’t have as strong an understanding of the gaps in the tech market as he thinks. Nor does he realize, once again, how much distrust he has sown among his user base.

But if Musk’s bullheaded past is any guide, he will drive the Concept X to the ground — or at least, until T8bn goes bankrupt, or he runs out of money to support it, or his investors in the company get nervous enough to oust him.

If this is the last step in X.com the saga leaves the billionaire with just $ 4 million to his name once again, this irony will be too delicious for words. In this case, perhaps Musk’s belief that we are all living in a simulation he deserves another look.