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Musk prematurely announces Twitter is now X

Kevin Murphy, July 24, 2023, Gossip

Elon Musk has declared that Twitter is rebranding as X, using x.com, apparently as the latest stage of his ongoing mission to destroy the company he acquired last year for lulz.

At 1744 UTC yesterday, Musk tweeted:

The logo on the Twitter web site has now changed to a minimalist X, which was later projected onto the walls of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

For me, and others around the world, x.com still resolves to a standard GoDaddy parking page, advertising sofas. Others have reported experiencing the redirect to twitter.com as intended.

It can theoretically take a day or more for name server changes to propagate throughout the entire DNS, due to caching and time-to-live settings, but in my experience with GoDaddy it has never taken more than a few minutes.

Still, it would be smart to make sure your new domain is actually working before announcing a rebranding.

Musk first owned x.com — one of a handful of single-letter .com names available — in the 1990s, when it was the original brand of the company that became PayPal. After he sold PayPal, the domain went with the company to eBay. But Musk reacquired the domain for an undisclosed sum in 2017.

He seems to have an obsession with the letter. His space flight company is called SpaceX. Tesla has a model X. He even named his kid X.

I’m reminded of another eccentric tech entrepreneur who obsessed over a single-letter domain, to the extent that it ultimately harmed his company.

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.