Elon Musk paid a million dollars to acquire the domain name X.com. It was the late 1990s. At the time, he wanted to replace the PayPal brand, the payment app he co-created. At the time, everyone had warned him about the use of the letter X inevitably associated with pornographic sites – no less than 4266 of them have a name starting with X.
Twitter is therefore now called 𝕏 and the site X.com. Expect amusing confusion when talking about a video posted on X — an “Xvideos”? Or an “X video”? Not really a stroke of marketing genius then. Especially since Twitter was one of those global brands, envied by marketers around the world, which have been translated into everyday language. Since Monday, July 24, we wonder what the adaptation of the verb declensions will give Tweeter – “Xer”?, “re-Xer”?, “so-and-so mentioned it in a Xeet”?, in any case it won’t be convenient.
𝕏’s visual identity is not even a drawn logo but comes from a standard computer alphabet (the Unicode Special Alphabet 4 which can be installed for free on any computer). Nothing to do with the expressive and elegant SpaceX logo which is the fruit of the talent of Ricardo Duque, an Argentinian designer commissioned by Elon Musk in 2002 when the company was founded. In any case, the old formula Twitter is having a great time with tasty diversions of the little blue bird dismembered and sometimes reconstituted in the shape of an X.
Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter X is a marker of his prodigious and neurotic career. One of his children has the first name X Æ A-12, in homage to the mathematical variable, to artificial intelligence, as much as to the fastest plane ever built (the A-12); a judge asked him to simplify (relatively) this little name to X AE A-XII. (We imagine the kindergarten scene, “Hey, X AE A-XII, are you coming to play?”).
At the roots of ambition
More seriously, in his book Musk to be published this fall, the author Walter Isaacson (also biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonard de Vinci) recounts the launch of X.com in 1999 which traces the outline of Musk’s ambitions for the new version of Twitter: “At the start of 1999, says Isaacson, he was convinced that the banking system was ripe for disruption”. In March of the same year, therefore, he created X.com, which was supposed to be a complete system covering all possible financial services: retail banking, current accounts, savings, online payment system, credit cards, consumer or real estate loans. Transactions would be carried out without delay, without the use of clearing houses, and all taken into account in real time. According to Isaacson, Musk’s vision was for financial flows to come down to movements in a database. For him, a service of this nature, multifaceted and frictionless (therefore practically at zero cost), would be able to capture a large share of bank deposits, “which could make it a company worth several trillions [milliers de milliards] of dollars”.
With his obsessive nature entirely focused on his project, Musk had imagined launching his service before the end of 1999, having rallied the most powerful venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, Sequoia Capital, and Barclay’s bank. As he will do years later with Tesla and SpaceX, Musk slept in the office for weeks to meet deadlines at all costs, imposing an exhausting pace on his teams. “This behavior ended in drama, but also in success, says Isaacson. One of the features of X.com was the ability to send money via a simple email; this possibility was immensely successful, especially for transactions on the auction site eBay. A battle ensued with the other founders of X.com over the use of the name PayPal with which X.com had ended up merging. Musk’s position was that PayPal should be a relatively simple service. accessory in the X.com catalog.” If you just want a niche transactional system, then PayPal fits the bill. But if you want to tackle the entire global financial system, then X is a much better name.”
This anecdote about the origin of X.com takes on particular resonance today with the evolution of the late Twitter. In a text message sent one morning last October at 3:30 am immediately after the takeover of Twitter, says Isaacson again, Musk asserts: “I am delighted to finally be able to set up X.com as initially planned, using this time Twitter as an accelerator, while helping, in passing, democracy and public debate”.
Chinese inspired
Elon Musk therefore has a vast ambition for “X”. The inspiration for it is based on the giant applications and services that have established themselves in the Chinese market. The first is Ant Group, a subsidiary of the conglomerate Alibaba. Ant Group offers the catalog of services described above to some 1.3 billion Chinese users and 80 million online merchants. It is the second largest financial services provider after Visa.
But Musk’s grand design is to replicate the WeChat “super app”, launched in 2011 by the Tencent group and which has become the digital Swiss army knife of more than a billion Chinese. WeChat is a social network, messaging system, payment method, photo and video sharing network. In other words, WeChat is Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, PayPal, Gmail, and Twitter aggregated into a single mobile application that even homeless people use: to give alms, they hold up their WeChat barcode.
This universality is exactly what Elon Musk is aiming for. But the background of WeChat’s development has nothing to do with the current Western landscape. WeChat has grown on virgin ground in a huge but closed market, where privacy is an ultra-flexible notion, and in a loose regulatory environment. In 2023, an X.com with equivalent ambitions should dislodge huge players starting with Meta and Google, just that. Overturning habits that are more than ten years old will not be easy, especially since, to say the least, Elon Musk has not created a serene climate around his activities. And then, you have to reckon with the regulatory wall: an application coupled with universal financial services, built on a heap of ultra-sensitive personal data will be scrutinized by an American regulator perpetually accused of laxity; as for Europe, an X.com inspired by Ant Group and WeChat simply has no chance of being authorized.
Musk has his formidable tenacity on his side, coupled with unique access to vast pools of capital. But what worked for Tesla and SpaceX will be much harder to develop a system that takes on the banking industry and tech giants.