![]() “Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath,” Chafkin quotes a person who knows both. Either way, the two billionaires are the apotheosis of the eccentricity of hyper-successful American capitalism. ![]() Musk became more famous as the founder of SpaceX and Tesla. The profound consequences of the deal for both men, Silicon Valley and global business are described in a new biography of Thiel by a US writer, Max Chafkin, called The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. Both were losing money, and were so similar that the efficiencies were obvious. ![]() In March 2000, as the dotcom boom was imploding, Musk and Thiel merged their businesses. Thiel, a socially awkward lawyer, controlled PayPal, which was working on IOU software for Palm Pilots, one of the hottest electronic gadgets of the time. Peter Thiel has a disregard for the conventions of decent business behaviour. A quirky South African maths whizz, Musk had already sold a business for $US300 million, Zip2, to Compaq. Musk’s X.com was financed by Sequoia Capital, one of the Silicon Valley’s venture capital legends. In 1999 there were so many financial-payment start-ups in Silicon Valley that Musk and Thiel were running competitors from the same floor of the same anonymous building. He might not appreciate that irony until his app is itself dead and buried.From office space above a stationery shop and a French-themed bakery in California’s Palo Alto, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel built a business that changed commerce.īut it wasn’t the same office. (Also: wasn’t Brand X always the crappier option?) Still, credit where due: Musk picked the right letter to mark the death of a cartoon bird, Xs rolling in its eyes. But the name reads more like the residue of too much time spent watching product comparison TV adverts than it does proof of genuine creativity. Musk may think himself clever by consolidating all his companies into one nice, neat “Brand X”. This latest change figures to have even more longtime Twitter users pulling up stakes for Threads, Spill and other new replacements. New names include “eXposure”, “eXult” and – once again – “s3Xy”. Reports say the conference rooms at Twitter HQ were changed on Monday to include the letter X. Musk has had a considerable hand in immolating much of that equity – doing away with character limits, hate speech protections and other features that made Twitter special and safe. Today, the company is worth less than a third of that, proof that Musk isn’t much better with numbers, either. X was the name used in the three Delaware-registered holding companies Musk used to buy Twitter for $44bn. At a Tesla shareholder meeting that same month, he revealed “a pretty grand vision” for X that “would be very useful to the world”, a one-stop shop to rival WeChat – China’s all-in-one messaging, social media and mobile payment service. Three months before purchasing Twitter, a user asked Musk if he had considered creating his own platform. (The rest is IPO history.) In 2017, Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal, hinting at bigger plans. ![]() In 2000, it merged with a competing software company co-founded by Peter Thiel – who promptly replaced Musk as the CEO of X.com and renamed the new conglomerate PayPal. Musk named his first company X.com, an online bank. (Time magazine called it one of the worst corporate rebrands of all time.) So it fits that the first letter companies turn to when they want to sound “with it” is Musk’s absolute favorite. But in the tech world, X has become a nothing letter, used to name everything from operating systems (Mac OS X) to gaming consoles (Xbox) to the telecom company Comcast, which changed names to Xfinity in hopes of escaping its overwhelmingly negative consumer reputation. In the days of Descartes, X was the preferred letter to symbolize the ineffable – a kiss, a signature, the place on a map where treasure is buried or the eyes of the dead in drawings. Musk’s love of the letter X is particularly uninspired. Musk tacked on the A-12, the label for Lockheed’s mold-breaking spy plane (“the coolest plane ever,” he gushed to Joe Rogan). Grimes said the X took inspiration from algebra’s “unknown variable”, while Æ (a diphthong that echoes the long I in most English dialects) referred to the “elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)”. X is how Musk referred to the son he had with the musician Grimes after the child’s original name – X Æ A-12 – was rejected for flouting a California law that limits birth certificates to “the 26 alphabetical letters of the English language”.
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