what's up with this whole "X" rebranding?

nitefox@lemmy.world to Out of the loop@lemmy.world – 109 points –

Is Musk competing with Zuck for the worst branding ever?

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Musk previously owned an online banking site known as x.com, which would later merge with PayPal, another service founded by Musk, which then became a separate entity with Musk no longer being involved it.

And when Musk was forced to complete the purchase of Twitter, he announced plans to make Twitter into a "Super app" like China's WeChat application, which can be used for payments.

Musk's hyperfocus on X might also be because when he was in his twenties, everything "cool" was having an X in it, like XForce and stuff like that.

He also wanted to create his X Corp company to have a single X as its name, but he couldn't do that because there was an Alphabet company already using that name.

Musk didn't found PayPal. X.com merged with Confinity, another online financial site (founded by Peter Thiel and others). Confinity had already begun development of PayPal at that time. In the resulting company, still called X.com, there was a series of leadership conflicts, with Musk pushing out CEO Bill Harris to become CEO, before himself being replaced by Peter Thiel. It was under Thiel that the company changed it's name to PayPal, and later went public. By the time there was a company called "PayPal", Musk was not longer involved with daily operations.