Last Updated on 07/26/2023 by てんしょく飯
Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, has discontinued its name and become “Company X,” and the familiar blue bird has been changed to the “X logo. What is this bizarre obsession with “X” by Musk?
He’s made the exact same fuss before.
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.” The book is a national bestseller that reveals the amazing story of the birth of the legendary Paypal venture through in-depth interviews with Musk, Peter Thiel, and other important Silicon Valley figures. (Jimmy Soni), which reveals the amazing story of the birth of the legendary PayPal venture, reveals Musk’s obsession with X and why he is so obsessed with it.
The book is a special feature of “The Founders,” a tumultuous book that has been widely talked about as “a book that kept me turning the pages” and “a book that I read in no time.
The very same turmoil had occurred before.
In 2000, Elon Musk’s company, X.com, and Peter Thiel’s company, Confinity, merged to form the legendary venture that would later become PayPal.
However, Musk, who became CEO of the merged company, showed a bizarre obsession with the “X” name, just as he did with Twitter, and the company was in turmoil. This is a scene that I have seen somewhere recently.
（The “company name” (between Musk’s X.com and Thiel’s Confinity) has been simmering since the merger.
It was the new CEO, Elon Musk, who decided that when users typed the URL “www.PayPal.com” into their browsers, they would automatically be redirected to the “www.X.com” site, much to the displeasure of many from Confinity (who had nurtured the PayPal brand).
Looking at the numbers, it was clear who had the advantage: as of July 2000, PayPal’s total number of payments was in the millions, compared to hundreds of thousands for X.com. Users flocked to the PayPal brand and put PayPal links at the end of their eBay listings and emails. The decision to auto-induce risked undermining PayPal’s hard-earned credibility, they feared.
Musk stopped calling PayPal by itself, renamed it “X-PayPal,” and declared that all X.com services would be prefixed with an “X” – “X-PayPal,” “X-Finance,” etc.
PayPal is a good name if you are satisfied with a niche payment system,” he said. But if you want to dominate the global financial system, you have to use the X name. PayPal is just one of the functions, not the company itself,” said Musk. For him, changing the company name to PayPal was “like Apple changing its name to Macintosh.
Why the obsession with “X”?
Musk’s commitment to the “X” is described in the following excerpt from the book “What’s the Coolest URL Name Elon Musk Ever Conceived? The following is an excerpt from the same book that explains how the company came up with the name “X.com”.
Musk decided on the name of the company before it even had a product: X.com (X.com). He believed it was “the coolest URL on the Internet.
For Musk, X.com was novel, intriguing, and free enough to fully express the spirit of the company, a place where all banking and investment services could coexist. Just as the “X” on a treasure map indicates the location of treasure, X.com indicated a place where online wealth could be found.
The URL was also one of only three rare one-letter domains in the world at the time, according to Musk (the other two were q.com and z.com).
There was also a practical reason why Musk wanted the name.
He believed that the world would soon be flooded with handheld devices – pocket computers with keyboards the size of postcards. And in that world, a short URL like X.com would be ideal. With a few taps of the thumb, one could access any financial product.
X is like an adult site.”
The employees of the merged company, however, were not at all convinced.
That summer, the problem reached a climax. Market research using group interviews revealed that the name “PayPal” was more favorable than “X.com. Vivienne Goh, the employee who led the research, said, “People kept telling us that a site with a name like ‘X’ was untrustworthy or looked like an adult site.
Goh also understood the limitations of user research. In the past, people thought even ‘Apple’ was a funny name,” she said. But she heard users’ concerns firsthand. They all said, ‘I don’t trust this name. If people keep saying almost the same thing, ‘I don’t trust this name, it sounds mysterious,’ then you have to wonder if they are right.”
Leena Fisher, who moved to X.com from the staid accounting firm KPMG, says she and other employees received “a lot of creepy emails” because of the dubious company name. She said, “When you think of our product, you think of PayPal, right? I always thought PayPal was a good name to describe what the company was about.”
Amy Lowe Clement, on the other hand, joined X.com because she was attracted to its grand vision. X was the core,” she says, “and they wanted to unite all of their products under that name.
But it was a simple email-based payment method (PayPal) that led to a breakthrough in the company’s growth. PayPal grew faster than X.com. PayPal grew faster than X.com, partly because X.com’s accounts were bank accounts, which cost a lot of money and took a lot of time to operate. Eventually, it made no sense to operate the X.com platform when it became clear that there was no prospect of quickly selling other profitable financial products to the bank account customers.
Musk’s refusal to concede that the name change was necessary, and his neglect of market research, drew flak. The “PayPal” camp felt that Musk was trying to make decisions based on his personal views rather than user preferences.
Musk had already been doing the exact same thing for more than 20 years.
As a result, he became the target of everyone’s displeasure, a coup d’etat ensued, and he was ousted from his position as CEO of X.com, the company he had created. X.com was safely renamed “PayPal” after Musk’s departure and is now a household name around the world.
Meanwhile, more than a decade later, Musk bought the URL for X.com back from PayPal.
At that time, he responded to the question, “What in the world are you going to do with that URL?
I replied on Twitter, which was still just one heavy user at the time, “Thanks for allowing me to buy X.com back, PayPal! I don’t have any plans at the moment, but it’s something I’m very attached to” (from “The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.)
Now if you type in “X.com” in the URL, you are redirected to the Twitter site.
After being ousted from X.com, Musk continued to focus on the “X,” creating SpaceX, for example. The acquisition of Twitter seems to have been the first step toward his 20-year-old vision of “gathering all the wealth on the Internet into X, where the treasure is. Will he be able to achieve this far-reaching ambition this time around?
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