Elon Musk is fixated on the letter X that not many understand. Many of his companies bear his name and the recent change of identity on Twitter, which is now called X, once again unleashed the question of why the tycoon is obsessed with the penultimate letter of the alphabet.
Come on, it’s not only with companies. A son of the richest man in the world has the letter in his first name. The baby he had with the singer Grimes, in 2020, is called X AE A-XII.
And so we can highlight that in his possession are SpaceX, X Corp (those who bought Twitter and the reason for the change to X), the model of Tesla X and his new artificial intelligence company, X.ai.
A review of The universe quotes statements from Julie Anderson Ankenbradntexecutive of PayPal During the first years of the company, he worked and knows firsthand how this X thing happened in Elon Musk.
In fact, she herself recalls that PayPal, just before acquiring this payment-related identification, was first called X.com. The same company, one of the first founded by Elon Musk, ceded the domain to the tycoon and he thanked him in a tweet in July 2017.
What about the X, Elon?
Julie recalls that “there was one night when Elon and the rest of the founders of X.com (now PayPal) sat around a table in the back of a long-gone bar, the Blue Chalk, in Palo High”.
He recounts that in one of those meetings they were trying to decide on the name and the options were Q, X or Z, accompanied by the dot com.
“While they were heatedly discussing the existing associations of these particular letters, I was scribbling hideous logo ideas on a napkin. Headstrong personalities, you know. Finally, when the waitress brought the next round of drinks, Elon asked her what she thought, and she said that she liked X.com. Elon banged on the table and said, ‘That’s it then!’ and everyone laughed, but in the end that was more or less how it was decided,” said the then PayPal executive.
“I agreed with the waitress that it was the best option among the three,” Julie adds in her story. “We always knew that it would cost an exorbitant amount of money to brand it properly due to the pornographic connotations of the letter X, but in the end that never materialized due to the company’s track record. Still, we made some cool debit cards,” Anderson said.