Elon Musk confirms that he just bought back X.com, the domain he owned in 1999
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Buying a single-letter domain is impressive, to say the least.
But a whole TechCrunch article, headlining with your face and name, because you tweeted about a domain name purchase for sentimental value is really next level. How did he manage to build such an impressive cognitive footprint in a world that's constantly fighting for your attention and ad revenue?
(... but then again, in the world of domain name purchases, I'm sure we'd all share a laugh if Sean Parker and / or Justin Timberlake bought "thefacebook.com" from Facebook.)
(Yes, I know Clinton used 2010. Her admin was a dumbass though).
It would also be nice if there was an enterprise alternative to Exchange that isn't Google Apps, but hey, dreams.
You know of those four (and can't think of anyone else!) because Elon Musk sold his vision to investors, employees, and the public through impressive salesmanship and an obscene amount of both grit and persistence. He aggregated resources and did what you do when you accumulate wealth for business purposes; he spent it to forward his goals. Some of which went towards impressive PR stunts and people wrangling.
Musk gets such great PR because the stuff he's done is actually an order of magnitude more impressing than others who have done "similar" things.
It's pretty analogous to people saying Steve Jobs had "amazing PR". It's easy to have amazing PR when you have amazing products, and so many of Apple's products (the Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) really were game changers in terms of functionality and usability.
The thing is; the entire point of his PR, no matter who helps perpetuate it, is built to craft the very opinion you have: Elon is amazing, and he can do it all on his own. While that's probably true to a large extent, it's not the only "truth" and reality. I, personally, am interested in the stories of the people who have helped him along the way - however few or many there may be.
Paypal was not even built by Elon Musk...By the way.
Again, it's similar to the argument some people make that the iPod was just another MP3 player, or the iPhone was just another phone.
Of course, being awesome enough to have Robert Downey Jr. model his portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man after you accounts for most of it.
“But Robert Downey, when we were prepping ‘Iron Man,’ said, ‘There’s somebody we should sit down and talk with.’”
“[He] said, ‘This is a guy who can give us some insight into what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.’”[0]
[0] https://www.recode.net/2016/10/12/13259344/elon-musk-iron-ma...
He feels like the individual equivalent to Google in the 00s and early parts of this decade when they were close to being infallible in the eyes of the general public and especially to the tech community.
Impressive job by the both of them!
I also think Elon Musk is reminiscent of the early railway pioneers - Brunel and Stephenson's son spring to mind.
I worked at PayPal 2003-2007. At some point my team had a meeting with the CEO of some vendor, and at the end, the guy pulled me aside and asked, "Do you know what happened to x.com? I used to work at PayPal, and when PayPal was acquired by eBay, part of the contract said that we could keep our x.com email addresses forever and that they would guarantee delivery would keep working as long as eBay still owned the domain. But it stopped working a little while ago".
So it turned out that eBay was contractually obligated to keep running x.com and the email addresses, but no one in ops knew that, thought it was unused, and shut it off.
I'm not sure if they ever got it working again, but I would guess that Elon didn't pay much for it, since eBay wasn't using it and technically was obligated to keep running it for Elon.
He may have just said, "Hey, I'll run it myself if you don't want it anymore."
I also recall pitching to various folks to use the domain as a URL shortener, but people rolled their eyes. Always felt like a missed opportunity to me, although I admit it was a kind of gimmicky idea.
Is IANA sitting on them?
edit: Oh, from the wiki [1]: "In 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved all single-letter and single-digit second-level domain names in the top-level domains com, net, and org, and grandfathered those that had already been assigned."
"...with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the Alphabet."
Oops.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
Authorities taking steps against undue corporate control of the internet. It's almost quaint today.
Funny that z.com redirects to trade.z.com - it's like, someone realised that actually, a single letter is too short to build a brand.
If we weren't excited by silly things like single letter domain names, x.com could be owned by whoever makes the 'xcom' game, and it would just be a mildly 'good' or amusing domain name, like when .io, .sh, .ly, etc. work out particularly well.
The values test is presumably not too onerous, if Facebook could pass it to acquire i.org (apparently unused).
I really hope we don't see http://a/ in the future. I'm not all that happy about the brand name TLDs that got approved .. feels like a return to AOL keywords.
I noticed Google uses just "go/XXXX" internally as an URL (no dots!).
So their internal DNS server must respond to just "go", or maybe there's a default search domain configured for everyone.
They threw one heck of a party and then promptly disappeared.
some random evidence of its legacy: https://github.com/johnj/php5-xcom
Doesn't seem to be too expensive for someone with $15 Bn net worth. Nice of Paypal to let go of it though, I guess.
A little over 20% of Tesla is around $11B. A little over 50% of SpaceX is $7B to $8B (SpaceX hasn't been given a valuation for almost two years now). That's already close to $20B.
(Thanks for down-votes in advance.)
The domain name x.com: It's interesting that something happened X.com as most of the other 26 single character domain names are reserved and won't be sold.
The history of it; Paypal, the previous owner of X.com and started by Elon Musk is a well known internet commerce success story; many readers not only have Paypal accounts, but also complex opinions of their service, and may even have worked there at one point.
Tantalizingly, as Elon Musk "enthusiastically" now owns X.com and has done other cool stuff in his life, it's interesting to fantasize about what might sort of content, if anything, Elon Musk will put up at X.com.
Finally, this is an article on TechCruch, and we're suckers for anything they post.
None of that might be as interesting as, say, "taking control of all .io domains with a targeted registration", but that has about 10x the points (1068 to this post's 104), but each upvote adds 1 point and is then plugged into the mysterious frontpage algorithm.
Elon Musk buying X.com isn't going to keep me up at night going wild with possibility, but it's really a human interest story and we're not robots. He owned this back in 1999; where where you then, where are you, and where do you think will you be, 18 years from now?