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- Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X this weekend, a name he has always loved.
- Over two decades ago, he had been looking to use X.com as the name for PayPal.
- According to Walter Isaacson, biographer of Musk, focus groups believed the name was "seedy".
Elon Musk recognizes X.com as the name of a business that is ready to revolutionize the world. Others see a porn site.
Musk wanted to call the PayPal company he and Peter Thiel were building at the turn of this century X.com, the new name for Twitter. Musk wanted to rebrand the company as X.com, or X-PayPal. But his colleagues disagreed.
Walter Isaacson, author of a forthcoming biography of Musk, tweeted: "Focus Groups showed that the name https://X.com conjured images of a seedy website you wouldn't talk about in polite society."
Max Chafkin, in his Peter Thiel bio "Contrarian", wrote about the same responses from focus groups.
Chafkin wrote: "X conducted a number of focus groups that showed customers disliked the name of the brand because it reminded of porn."
Musk doesn't believe that.
According to Isaacson, Musk stated that PayPal was better if you only want to be a niche system. "But if your goal is to dominate the financial system of the world, then X would be a better name."
According to a tweet by Isaacson, Musk's relationship with the letter goes back to 1999 when he founded X.com to be a "one stop shop for all your financial needs." Musk's colleagues were concerned about the name even then.
Musk eventually left PayPal in 2000.
Musk, who didn't immediately respond to an inquiry for comment, seems unmoved even by the connotations of the name.
Musk bought the domain name X.com in 2017 from PayPal. He said at the time, via a tweet, that it "has great sentimental values" for him. Musk has a number of brands that include the letter X. These include SpaceX and his more recent company xAI.
Musk is using the letter X as the centerpiece of his efforts to rebrand Twitter, almost nine months after he purchased the social media platform. He changed the logo of the company from the iconic bluebird to a letter X in white against a dark background over the weekend.
Isaacson claims that for Musk, the acquisition of Twitter and rebranding it as X.com was the culmination in his decade-long quest to create the brand X.com. Isaacson said Musk had told him he planned to transform Twitter into X.com long before acquiring the platform. The new platform, he explained, would also include a financial component.
"I'm very excited to finally implement X.com the way it should have been, using Twitter as a catalyst!" Isaacson claimed Musk sent him a text at 3:30 am on the day before he bought Twitter in October.
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By: grivera@insider.com (Gabriel Rivera)
Title: Elon Musk pushed for PayPal’s website to be rebranded as X.com more than 20 years ago, but focus groups reportedly thought it sounded like a porn website
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-rebrand-paypall-x-sounded-like-porn-site-twitter-2023-7
Published Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:06:31 +0000
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