X.Com By Twitter was an online bank co-founded Elon Mus.
X.com
In 1999, Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho co-founded X.com, an online bank in Palo Alto, California. Because it had created a simple payment mechanism, Palo Alto-based Confinity Inc., a rival software business, piqued Musk’s interest in a merger in 2000. The united business became known as PayPal, and X.com was redirected to PayPal.
PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002 for US$1.5 billion. PayPal was separated in 2015 to become a separate business. The X.com website has a redirect to Twitter as of July 23, 2023, when Musk decided to rename the social networking service X after buying it.
X.com Business Model
An early example of an internet bank was X.com, whose deposits were covered by the FDIC. Elon Musk and Greg Kouri, who eventually provided funding for Musk’s other businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, founded the company. [1]
No fines or overdraft charges were imposed on customers. A $20 cash card and a $10 card for each new sign-up were given as rewards for referring new members. For their period, these features were distinctive. Customers might, for instance, send money to someone by simply entering their email address into X.com. [2] Customers could also register for an account entirely online, eliminating the requirement to send a check.
X.com History
Elon Musk had plans to build a full-service online bank that included brokerages, insurance, checking and savings accounts throughout the 1990s. “I think we’re at the third stage now where people are ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository,” Musk said in a 1999 interview with CBS MarketWatch.
Musk formally started developing plans for an online bank in January 1999 while trying to sell his firm, Zip2. In March 1999, Musk committed around $12 million to the co-founding of X.com with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho, a month after Zip2 was acquired by Compaq.
Payne was Fricker’s friend; Ho was an engineer at Silicon Graphics and an executive at Zip2, and Fricker worked with Musk while Musk was an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. Prior to relocating to an office in Palo Alto, California, the business was first operated out of a home. Five months after x.com launched, Musk fired Fricker due to disagreements over how to operate the business; as a result, the other two co-founders, Payne and Ho, left.
On December 7, 1999, X.com made its public debut, with Bill Harris, a former CEO of Intuit, serving as the organisation’s first CEO. [11][3] X.com garnered over 200,000 signups in just two months.
Confinity, X.com’s most ferocious rival, and X.com combined in March 2000 to form X.com. As its largest shareholder and new CEO, Musk was chosen. Confinity’s PayPal service, launched in 1998, allowed users of Palm Pilots to send money to one another over the device’s infrared connections. PayPal then evolved to enable users to transmit money via email and the web.
When Musk went on his honeymoon in Australia in September 2000, the X.com board opted to replace Musk as CEO with Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Confinity. PayPal replaced X.com as of June 2001.
PayPal was purchased by eBay for US$1.5 billion on October 3, 2002.
PayPal was separated in July 2015 to become a stand-alone, publicly traded company.
X.com Reuse of domain name
Musk repurchased the domain name X.com from PayPal on July 5, 2017. Later, he gave an explanation for his purchase of the website, saying that “it has great sentimental value.”
On July 14, 2017, X.com was relaunched with a bespoke error page showing a “y” and a blank white page with a “x” in the upper left corner. Having only the letter “x” in its source code, the website displayed in this manner. Visitors to X.com were forwarded to The Boring Company’s website in December 2017, which Musk also controls. This was carried out to promote a hat sale.
Elon Musk described his purchase of Twitter as “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” on October 4, 2022, which was tied to X.com. Musk stated that he will carry out the X product plan “with some improvements” in order to turn Twitter into “the most valuable financial institution in the world” in a conversation with Ron Baron a month later.
Musk revealed a new social media site, X.com, and announced the rebranding of popular social networking service Twitter to “X” on July 22, 2023. But when consumers go to X.com, they are immediately sent to Twitter.com. The recognisable blue bird has been replaced across the entire website by a black “X” logo, a capital “X” with two strikes from the Unicode block of Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, which has Latin roots. Along with other Twitter-owned accounts, Elon Musk’s profile and the official Twitter account have both adopted the new “X” logo and dropped the word “Twitter” from their identities. For instance, “@TwitterBlue” has been changed to “@XBlue”. [29] The specifics of this rebranding have not yet been made public.
The app connected to X.com, formerly known as “Twitter,” changed its logo to a “X” on July 28, 2023, on both the App Store and Google Play. The app’s name is now ‘X’ on Google Play, and if downloaded or updated, it will appear as ‘X’ on the iOS Home Screen even though it is still listed as ‘Twitter’ on the App Store due to the requirement for 2 characters.
