X.com was an online bank co-founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. In 2000, X.com merged with competitor Confinity Inc., a software company also based in Palo Alto. Elon Musk was interested in Confinity because of its easy payment system. The merged company changed its name to PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for US$1.5 billion in 2002. In 2015, PayPal was spun off and became an independent company. As of July 23, 2023, the website redirects to Twitter after Musk decided to rebrand the social networking service as X following his acquisition. Prior to that, post-merger, the website had redirected to PayPal.
Reuse of domain name
On July 5, 2017, Musk repurchased the domain name X.com from PayPal.[21][22] He explained later that he bought the website because "it has great sentimental value".[23]
On July 14, 2017, X.com was launched again, consisting of a blank white page with one "x" in the top left corner,[24] and a custom error page displaying a "y".[25][26] The site displayed this way due to having nothing in its source code except the single letter "x". In December 2017, X.com redirected visitors to The Boring Company's website, which Musk also owns. This was done in order to advertise a hat sale.[26]
On October 4, 2022, Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app", linked to X.com.[27][28] In conversation with Ron Baron a month later, Musk said that he would execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which would make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world."[29]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com