The History Behind Elon Musk’s ‘X’ Logo That May Replace Twitter

• Elon Musk announced Saturday that he plans to rebrand Twitter and change the bird logo to ‘X.’
• The rebrand is part of Musk’s long-touted vision to create an ‘everything app.’
• Musk previously wanted X to be the name of a banking services site now known as PayPal.

Elon Musk announced plans on Saturday to ditch Twitter’s bird logo for an “X” — a reference to the CEO’s vision to create an all-encompassing “everything app” that may incorporate shopping and banking services, among other features.

The domain X.com now redirects users to Twitter. Musk said a new “interim” X logo will go live Sunday. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Twitter’s potential new logo recalls Musk’s earlier tech entrepreneur days when he was a 28-year-old in Silicon Valley with ambitions to start an online banking company in 1999.

By that point, Musk launched and sold Zip2 — a company that provided city travel guide software to newspapers — for about $341 million. Musk earned $22 million out of the deal.

Using that cash, his next venture focused on banking services. The idea was to create an online tool for mutual fund management, according to a 1999 Marketwatch article.

What would this online service be called? According to Julie Anderson Ankenbrandt, a former PayPal executive, the name was born in a classic Silicon Valley setting: a café.

“There was a night early on where Elon, the other founders of the company … and I sat around a backroom table at a long-defunct bar called the Blue Chalk (Cafe) in Palo Alto, trying (to) decide what the name of the company should be,” Ankenbrandt wrote in a 2016 Quora post. “At that point, early 1999, the intent was still to build a revolutionary full-service financial platform (credit card, mutual fund, and standard banking data all in one place – just imagine! 🙂 ) and the question at hand was whether to be q, x, or z dot com.”

According to Ankenbrandt, a waitress at the café would have the final say.

“Elon asked her what she thought, and she said she liked x.com,” Ankenbrandt wrote. “Elon pounded the table and said, ‘That’s it then!'”

The former PayPal executive noted the founders felt branding would be an issue because of the “pornographic associations of the letter X. Although, nowadays, Musk arguably might welcome the crude association.

“But it never really came to that in the end given the trajectory of the company,” she wrote.

Ankenbrandt could not be reached for comment.

X.com launched in late 1999. In 2000, the company merged with its competitor Confinity, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin.

The name never stuck: Disagreements within the company, including around the x.com name, would soon be followed by Musk’s ousting in late 2000. Thiel was named the new CEO.

While issues with the name didn’t lead to Musk’s firing — one of the internal arguments revolved around where to move the company’s servers — most employees didn’t favor the name as much as Musk.

According to Ashlee Vance’s biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” almost everyone in the company preferred the name PayPal. In 2001, x.com was rebranded accordingly.

Musk soon moved on to other ventures, including founding SpaceX and investing in Tesla. But after more than a decade, Musk never let the name go.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend.

In 2017, Musk purchased the domain X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed sum.

“No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me,” Musk tweeted at the time.

Eight years later, after he purchased Twitter for $44 billion, Musk formally merged his newly-purchased social media company into a Nevada-incorporated entity called X Corp.

“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk said in October 2022.

The Twitter CEO said in a live forum that he envisions a service that “does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface.”