Elon Musk poured so much of his fortune into X.com, he only had $4 million left in the entire world.
This was not the 21st century. X.com. It was 1999, the height of the dot-com boom. Musk had just sold his first startup, a city guide website called Zip2 – PC maker Compaq wanted it for its search engine. Musk made $22 million on the deal. He didn’t play it safe with his win. The 28-year-old South African immigrant spent $18 million building a less modest idea. X.com was to be an online hub for all financial transactions in the world.
What did “X” have to do with finance? When people think of X, Musk insisted, they think of treasure. They think “X marks the spot.” Musk never wavered in that belief, even when mounds of evidence showed that most people Really Imagine what happens when they see that “X.com” is obscene… his blind love sparks a boardroom revolt that ousts him as CEO, and ultimately ousts the X name. Diya – replaced by PayPal.
If you, like most of us, are still upset about Musk’s decision to delete his Twitter name (and his Multi-billion dollar brand identity) by scrolling a big X on it, the main story of PayPal Mafia starts from where you start. There are striking parallels between that era, now documented in multiple bestselling books, and this one. It’s all about: disdain for beloved brands; emotional decisions that split even allies; A grand “everything app” style vision; And perhaps most tellingly, how investors would swoon every time Musk talked about it.
That last part may be what Musk is counting on now: a desperate bid to drum up curiosity, so that new investment can dig the company formerly known as Twitter out of its deep financial hole. Or the name change could be the result of a quarter-century of stoking at the expense of X.com, which Musk Bought back from paypal. 2017 for “emotional” reasons. Either way, there are reasons to think the sting is about to strike a second time in this cautionary tale of hubs.
Poor History X
To be fair to Musk, he was no dummy back then. The most recent best-seller for storytelling, Jimmy Sonny’s Founders: The PayPal Story and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valleyisn’t shy about Musk’s shortcomings (on the contrary Elon Musk, 2017 biography with a tendency towards hagiography). but still Founder paints a picture of Musk as a hard-working 20-something whose fascination with finance allowed key insights into the messy process that created PayPal.
For example, Musk took an early lead in the online payments battle between X.com and its rival, a startup called Confinity that operated out of the same Palo Alto office space.
Not only was Musk quick to recognize the value of being able to pay by email (rather than beaming it among Palm pilots, the concept was initially championed by Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel); Rather, he had paid. X.com Users paid $20 at signup, while Thiel paid $10. With the competition draining money, the companies were forced to merge in 2000 under the name X.com. Musk will be the largest shareholder of the combined company.
Musk had it all at the time. Especially after X.com’s earlier, lesser-known boardroom coup. It was here that Musk ousted his chosen CEO, Intuit veteran Bill Harris, after Harris had done all the hard work of the integration. Musk himself took on the role of CEO. But apparently he didn’t realize that the most valuable thing he had was his name. The name of Confinity’s payment app, the name eBay sellers love: PayPal.
Founder PayPal goes into depth on the creation of the name, and it’s worth lingering on point. Thiel’s team hired a professional naming company that considered hundreds of options, checked to see if they violated trademarks, and came up with a shortlist that included MoMo. , Cachet and PayPal were included. It took a while for the team to come around to the latter, but once they realized it could be a verb – “just PayPal it for me” – they never looked back.
While X.com gained 200,000 users shortly after its launch, not one of those users said, “This is just X for me.” Worse, the obscene-sounding name attracted what one early female X.com employee called “a lot of horrible, horrible emails.”
Musk didn’t care. He was not only impressed with how it looked (and with its personal coolness [email protected] email address), he thought “PayPal” was too restrictive. “It would be like Apple calling itself a Mac,” Musk told its author, Jimmy Sonny Founder. X was going to change the financial world, so it had to come before everything else.
It mandated that the payment product in the merged company would be called X-PayPal. According to Max Chafkin, author of Peter Thiel’s biography ContradictoryMusk asked the “marketing department to rework the PayPal logo to include an X,” and to “start eliminating the PayPal name entirely.”
Team Thiel fought hard against X. A series of focus groups “revealed, over and over again, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to trust this website, this is an adult website,'” X.com marketing manager Vivian Go told Sony. “It’s hard to refute when people say over and over again, almost in the same words, ‘I wouldn’t trust it. It sounds really mysterious.’
But Musk was adamant. He dealt with the trust issue, then as now, by ignoring it. Also as now, he pushed engineers to rewrite the codebase his way, and seemed oblivious to the cash the company was burning. All of this was in service of X’s lofty vision, which he described as the “Amazon of financial services” for investors.
All of this led to another boardroom revolt at the company, where Thiel called a meeting to end their old rivalry while Musk was on a belated honeymoon with his first wife, Justine. That was cool — but Musk’s instinct was to cover it up, save face, and push X.com as the company name, even if he couldn’t win over the PayPal product question.
Check out this CNN report from 2001 – in which Musk sounds like it was his decision to reverse, and titles the company “X.com, now PayPal.”
Stop trying to make X happen.
Why Musk still thinks he can, and does, make X happen. Replacing another famous brand. A quarter century later, a mystery remains. The world has moved on. The online payment networks of Apple Pay and Google Pay, not to mention Square, are what most consumers will need.
The “everything app” concept embodied by WeChat hasn’t left China. Starting in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg Tried to emulate WeChat via Facebook Messenger.which has a larger audience than Twitter, and failed.
Musk did not offer any details about the upcoming X service, nor did he respond to a WeChat question. When challenged by Twitter employees in November about the “fundamental differences” between Twitter and WeChat, According to The New York TimesMusk said the questioners didn’t know what they were talking about and moved on.
But it seems that Musk, surrounded by a bubble of yes men like X.com veteran David Sachs, doesn’t have as strong a grip on the space in the technology market as he thinks. Nor does he realize, once again, how much mistrust he has sown among his user base.
But if Musk’s past is any guide, he’ll get Concept X off the ground — or at least, until Twitter goes bankrupt, or runs out of money to back it up. Go, or get his fellow investors in the company nervous enough to fire him.
If this latest twist in the X.com saga leaves the billionaire with only $4 million to his name, the irony will be too delicious for words. In that case, maybe Musk believes that we are all living in a simulation. Will deserve another look.
Credit : mashable.com
