Elon Musk pushed for PayPal's website to be rebranded as X.com more than 20 years ago, but focus groups reportedly thought it sounded like a porn website
- Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as X over the weekend — a name that has long been one of his favorites.
- He had wanted to use the name X.com for PayPal over two decades ago.
In X.com, Elon Musk sees the name of an enterprising business ready to change the world. But others see a porn website.
At the turn of the century, Musk had wanted to use the name X.com — the new name of Twitter — for the company now known as PayPal that he was building with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Musk wanted the company to be rebranded either as X.com or X-PayPal, but his fellow executives disagreed.
"Focus groups showed that the name http://X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company," Walter Isaacson, the author of an upcoming biography on Musk tweeted.
In his Peter Thiel biography "Contrarian," Max Chafkin wrote about the same response from focus groups.
"X has conducted a series of focus groups showing that customers had disliked the brand name, because it reminded them of porn," Chafkin wrote.
Musk didn't buy that.
"If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better," Musk said, according to Isaacson's excerpts. "But if you want to take over the world's financial system, then X is the better name."
Musk's history with the letter dates back to 1999, when the mogul founded X.com as a "one-stop everything-store for all financial needs," according to an excerpt tweeted by Isaacson. Even then, some of Musk's collaborators worried the name carried pornographic implications.
The company eventually merged into PayPal, which Musk left in 2000.
Musk, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, still seems unmoved by the name's connotations.
In 2017, Musk purchased the domain name X.com from PayPal, musing in a tweet at the time that the name "has great sentimental value" to him. Several of Musk's brands among his slate of companies include the letter X, including SpaceX and the more recent company xAI.
The letter X is now the cornerstone of Musk's efforts to rebrand Twitter almost nine months after his purchase of the social media platform. Over the weekend, he changed the company's logo from the iconic blue bird to a white letter X against a black backdrop.
For Musk, the acquisition and rebrand of Twitter was the culmination of his decades-long quest to establish the brand X.com, according to Isaacson. Musk told Isaacson he intended to transform Twitter into X.com well before his acquisition of the platform and that the new platform would include a financial element.
"I am very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!" Isaacson said Musk texted him at 3:30 a.m. on one of the days leading up to his purchase of Twitter last October.