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Elon Musk chaos credited with surge in .social regs

Kevin Murphy, December 7, 2022, Domain Registries

Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter has been credited with leading to a surge in .social domain registrations last month, according to registry Identity Digital.

.social leaped into the top 10 of the company’s most-registered TLDs at number five internationally and number two in North America, second only to legacy .info, the company reported this week.

ID said that month-over-month .social regs increased 435% in the first two weeks of November.

It’s a pretty small TLD, so the boost only equated to an increase of about 5,000 domains in November, according to zone files, which put the current count at about 35,000.

Musk closed his acquisition in late October, and he started Trussing it into the ground the following week, laying off thousands of employees and cack-handedly attempting to monetize the “blue check mark”.

ID reckons this is behind the increase in .social sales, with CEO Akram Atallah saying in a press release: “Volatility in social platforms that people rely on leads users to take action to own their digital identity and content, which often starts with finding a domain name.”

He pointed to Twitter alternative Mastadon, which is a decentralized, open-source platform and uses a .social domain, as a driver for the growth. Some of the new .social regs point to Mastadon installs, ID said.

ID also sold premium names arts.social, lol.social and justice.social during the month, but no .social domains appear on its top 20 sales in its most-recent monthly report.

Billionaire Elon Musk reacquired x.com

Kevin Murphy, July 11, 2017, Domain Sales

Billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal founder Elon Musk has reacquired the domain name x.com for an undisclosed sum.
X.com was the domain he acquired in 1999 and originally used for PayPal, before its 2001 rebrand.
Musk, who currently runs private space travel trailblazer SpaceX, confirmed the purchase in a tweet today:


The deal was first spotted by domainer/blogger Elliot Silver, who noticed the Whois change.
Musk also seemed to say in a subsequent tweet that he had originally bought x.com back from its original owner in 1999 for stock in the nascent company, which 18 years later would presumably be worth an absolute fortune.


While the price of the 2017 purchase was not disclosed, one has to assume it would be worth millions; pocket change to a man reportedly worth over $15 billion today.