The world’s most valuable automobile company, the world’s first private space transportation firm, and the world’s most controversial social media platform are now owned by the same person. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for 46 billion dollars in 2022, started to manage the company by pressing every button after a period when we were hurting for “freedom of expression”.
The sudden and hard-to-explain decisions he made were actually not too surprising for those who knew Musk before. When Musk, who offered to give an oxygen cylinder produced by SpaceX to divers to rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, went so far as to call the diver “pedophilia” for a logical reason; Turns out he wasn’t a regular billionaire at all. The number of such behaviors and attitudes increased over time, just as the number of dollars in his wealth. But his obsession with the letter X never changed.
Before we get started, you can watch Elon Musk’s story—through all the companies he’s founded:
Year 1999, one of the first digital banking systems in history, “x.com” is established:
Two newly born fellow entrepreneurs in Palo Alto, California; Elon and Kimbal Musk aren’t even in their 30s yet. However, they sell Zip2 software, a digital city guide system, to Compaq, the technology giant of the time, for $307 million. With this sale, Musk has a boneless $22 million in his pocket, which is a huge fortune if you’re in 1999 -compared to today.
Musk, who became a Silicon Valley millionaire at the age of 28, tells about your achievements in that magazine; he rode in expensive sports cars and wore mannequins on his arm. After one year of enjoying the fame and wealth that came at a young age, he came up with a solution to the problem that was always on his mind in 1999:
“How about we connect banks to the internet?”
In fact, this has been done before, but digital banking was used in very limited areas until Musk stepped in, as internet infrastructures were limited and its potential was not realized before. Musk originally wanted to “digitize money,” and with this goal, he bought the domain X.com and founded the company.
Year 2000, X.com became the world’s first widespread payment system and Musk sold the company: Today we know that company as PayPal…
With a rapid rise, X.com established an infrastructure where people could pay online without using any physical money. It may not sound like a novelty when you hear it today, but at the time, this company seemed to have a motorized carriage. Musk continued to run X.com for a while, which merged with Comnify. Then the name of the company was changed to PayPal.
Transforming into a money sending and receiving service with e-mail and infrared connection, PayPal was acquired by e-commerce company eBay in 2002 for a full $1.5 billion. Musk, who is still in his early 30s, earned $175 million from this sale for only 11.5% of his share.
The year 2002, Musk buried his love for the letter X in his heart and founded a new company called SpaceX to keep it alive in space:
Having bought Tesla, a small car company, with the money he earned, Musk founded the SpaceX company with the remaining money. He gathered the most stellar astronomers and space engineers of the period in this company. Its aim was to reduce the costs of sending rockets into Earth orbit and to make states its customers. SpaceX has reduced this cost to one in 10 with reusable rockets since the beginning of 2010, indeed, governments have become customers.
Year 2015, Tesla Model X, one of the most popular electric SUV models of all time:
The first example of Musk’s unconventional approaches to brand creation always appeared at Tesla. After Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, which was also the first electric super-sports car, Musk began to give new models the letters that make up the word SEXY, respectively. He named it 3 because the letter E belonged to another company at the time. However, X had again become part of Musk’s vision. The Model X was launched as a hybrid SUV with sports features.
The year is 2017. Musk, who bought the “X.com” domain name he sold years ago with the statement “I don’t have a big plan for now, but it has great sentimental value to me”, paid about 6 million dollars for it:
Neither PayPal nor Musk made a statement about the financial value of X.com, but according to data from domain pricing sites, this domain name was equivalent to approximately $ 6 million at that time. Of course, compared to this price fortune, it’s like fleas on a camel. Finally, he stated that he gave moral value. For a long time, the site showed nothing more than just the letter X. We learned the details of that grand plan later:
Year 2020. Welcome Ebubekir Sıd…. amaaaan X Æ A-11 baby…
Married to musician Grimes, Musk preferred to give his first child from this relationship a strange sim like X Æ A-11. He never explained clearly and seriously what that meant. However, due to the difficulty in pronouncing the name, she calls her child X for short.
The year is 2022. We thought it was another bad joke, but it turned out to be serious, buying Twitter for $46 billion:
Elon Musk, who paid $ 46 billion to Twitter through X Corp, the company he founded for which it is unclear, now also owned the social media giant. For a time, he ran the company with decisions that were so badly received that Twitter made it the place people wanted to escape as soon as possible. In the same week that it imposed a tweet view limit, its rival Meta (Facebook) launched Threads, which is logged in with Instagram.
Twitter is now a platform where millions of people seek alternative geographies to migrate digital tribes. As a matter of fact, there is no application that offers features as comprehensive as Twitter, including Threads. In addition, Musk continues to make snap decisions with the aim of making Twitter “the app for everything”.
As of July 2023, Musk, who directed his long-inactive X.com address to Twitter.com, started to take the first steps for the conversion. Twitter’s official Twitter profile has been renamed X, and we’ve entered a period of unrealistic rebranding, where all company assets are slowly turning into X.
It’s not all about Twitter taking the name X, all of Elon Musk’s companies are about to merge under the name “X Corp”:
Elon Musk, who established an umbrella company under the name X Corp, positioned Twitter under this company. While he was managing X Corp, he founded Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink, the new artificial intelligence company xAI; may pass into X Corp at any time.
It turns out that Elon Musk is not only after me to set up Twitter, but he also dreams of ONE COMPANY DOING EVERYTHING, from space shipping to the terraforming of Mars, from electric transportation to tunneling systems, from brain chips and humanoid robots to artificial intelligence.
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