reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @jimmyasoni
@jimmyasoni - Jimmy Soni
In light of the Twitter name change, here’s what I found about http://X.com while researching THE FOUNDERS, an early history of PayPal. I communicated with http://X.com’s pre-Elon owners and interviewed Elon as well as other http://X.com/PayPal employees about the URL and its history. http://X.com’s first owners & early years: Early in the creation of his second start-up, Musk had conviction about its name: http://X.com. This was, Musk believed, simply “the coolest URL on the internet.” He wasn’t the only one who believed so. In the early 1990s, a pair of engineers, Marcel DePaolis and Dave Weinstein, had purchased http://x.com for their company Pittsburgh Powercomputer. Their original URL — http://ppc.com — had been taken from them when the contract for managing URL DNS information was taken over by a company called Network Solutions. So they decided to call up Network Solutions and explore other URL options — which is when they discovered that http://X.com was available and bought it. Musk’s first http://X.com purchase: After Pittsburgh Powercomputer was sold off, DePaolis and Weinstein negotiated to hold on to the http://X.com URL, enjoying its use for their personal email addresses. Over the years, they turned down bids to sell the URL, underwhelmed by the various offer terms. In early 1999, they received fresh interest. “Under the looming shadow of Y2K, we were approached by Elon Musk,” they said, “…We checked him out and liked his story and plan.” They sold http://X.com to Musk in exchange for cash and a small stake in the company. The 1999 http://X.com Rationale: Musk came out of the deal sporting, among other things, a memorable corporate email address: e@x.com. He believed deeply in the http://X.com URL and company name, which, to him, seemed novel, intriguing, and open-ended enough to capture the company’s gist—a place for all banking and investment services to coexist. Just as X “marked the spot” on a treasure map, so http://X.com marked the spot money would be kept online. He also noted that the URL was rare, one of only three single-letter URLs in the world at the time (the other two: q .com and http://z.com). Musk had a practical rationale for the name, too. http://X.com wasn’t just easy to remember—it was also exceedingly easy to type. He believed the world would soon be powered by handheld devices facilitating every part of users’ lives—handheld devices with uncomfortable keyboards the size of an index card. In this world, http://X.com was the ideal address because a customer was only ever five keystrokes away from their full financial life. Musk’s conviction about the http://X.com name also grew out of the unfortunate name of his first start-up, Zip2. Heads down writing Zip2’s code, Musk had outsourced the naming to a branding firm—and regretted it. “First of all, what the hell does it mean? It’s literally one of the worst URLs you could possibly have. Because is it Zip, the digit ‘2’? Or is it Zip t-w-o? Or Zip t-o? Or Zip t-o-o?” Musk said. “You just picked the homonym with the most number of variations. And websites don’t work with homonyms. So it’s dumb in every possible way.” “I deferred brand and marketing and whatever to people I thought were domain experts,” Musk said, “And then discovered subsequently that you just have to use common sense. And that’s actually a better guide.” To Musk, http://X.com’s name was everything Zip2’s wasn’t—and he was convinced http://X.com would become everything Zip2 hadn’t. “He was really passionately inspired by that letter,” an http://X.com colleague recalled. The second http://X.com purchase: Decades after purchasing the http://X.com URL, he bought it again in 2017. Musk chuckled retelling his reacquisition of the domain. The broker who sold him the URL saw the deal as a crowning achievement. “He wrote me this long heartfelt letter . . . they were like ‘We are so happy to have restored this URL to you,’” Musk said. At the time, he was asked about his ambitions for the URL, and Musk responded on Twitter. “Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back http://X.com!” he wrote. “No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.”
@jimmyasoni - Jimmy Soni
This is one of many nuggets drawn from THE FOUNDERS, which has a lot more about http://X.com, its ethos, its origins, and why it became what it became. You can check that out here: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-Silicon/dp/B08CWD9WLY/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
@jimmyasoni - Jimmy Soni
Also, the logo, b/c why not...
@jimmyasoni - Jimmy Soni
Some add'l quotes from my research that wound up on the cutting room floor. These hopefully illuminate Elon's thinking about http://X.com back in the X.com-vs-Confinity days: “For a pure payments product, PayPal is the right name,” Musk said. “If you want to be the center of the world’s currency, it is not the right name. If you want to be Grand Central Station for global finance, then Paypal is like a feature.” “It is a very specific function to ‘pay’ a ‘pal,’” Musk said. “It would be like Apple renaming itself the Mac,” Musk said. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better. If you want to, say, let’s like take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name, because PayPal is a feature, not the thing itself,” Musk said.