Greg's Corner

X marks the spot for Elon Musk

One school of thought in online business is to have the shortest domain name, or URL, possible. This way it’s supposedly easier for customers to remember how to find you online. For example, even large companies like Amazon and Google have the shortcut URLs of a.co and g.co, respectively. What about the top-level domains like .com though? In the early 1990s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the non-profit organization that oversees domain names, reserved single character domain names for future use. Only a handful that had already been registered were allowed to remain, one of those was X.com.

Previously X.com was owned by a newcomer to the tech scene by the name of Elon Musk. Yes, the same Elon Musk who currently runs Tesla Motors and The Space-X program. X.com’s original intent was to be an innovative online banking service. Here is a video of a much younger Elon Musk talking about X.com.

For the record Mr. Musk admittedly wrecked that McLaren and did not have the car insured, but even back then he was rich enough to not need it. Also, he has never been on the cover of Rolling Stone as far as I can tell, but he has been on the cover of a multitude of other magazines.

X.com eventually merged with another company that became PayPal. It was at that point that X.com then pointed to PayPal’s website. Musk was PayPal’s CEO until he was ousted in October of 2000. Now it is being reported that PayPal has sold X.com back to Elon Musk for an unspecified amount, and who better to have it than Elon Musk? For example, Tesla Motors makes the Model X which is an electric crossover SUV, and he has the aforementioned and much-lauded Space-X program which is a huge innovator in commercial space flight.

Currently, X.com will only produce an error message in your browser saying the site can’t be reached, however, it will be interesting, to say the least, to see what Elon Musk will do with it.