His concept for X.com was grand.
Musk wanted the company to be named X.com and PayPal to be one of its subsidiaries. They also attempted to change the name of the payment system to X-PayPal, but this was resisted as PayPal was already a trusted brand.
Twitter owner Elon Musk recently announced the rebranding of Twitter’s bird logo as “X”, with the aim of building X as a global marketplace centered around audio, video, messaging, payments/banking and more. The domain x.com now redirects users to twitter.com. Musk mentioned that the new X logo would go live later today.
But how many of you know that Twitter’s potential new logo reminds Elon Musk of his tech entrepreneur days when he was 28, and aspired to start an online banking company in 1999.
According to popular author Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s fascination with the name X.com goes back a long way. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ready for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded X.com.
“His concept for X.com was grand. It will be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital shopping, checking, credit cards, investments and loans. Transactions will be settled instantly, no waiting for payment. His insight was that money is simply an entry in a database, and he wanted to create a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time,” Isaacson wrote on Twitter.
According to the author, Musk was able to entice the influential head of Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, to make a sizeable investment in X.com. Moritz then facilitated an agreement to partner with Barclays Bank and a community bank in Colorado so that X.com could offer mutual funds, have a bank charter and be FDIC-insured.
Musk wanted the company to be named X.com and PayPal to be one of its subsidiaries. They also attempted to change the name of the payment system to X-PayPal, but this was resisted as PayPal was already a trusted brand. Later, a conflict arose between Max Levchin and Musk over the choice of the main operating system, Microsoft Windows or Unix.
Reports suggest that a disagreement over the X.com name led to Musk’s split from PayPal in late 2000. Most employees favored the PayPal name, and in 2001, the company was rebranded accordingly.
