Maybe Elon owned it going back to Paypal Mafia days, pointed it at OpenAI while they were friends, and then remembered recently about owning the domain (I assume being the wealthiest person in the world involves constantly forgetting about all the things that you own) and changed the CNAME or whatever.
I’d bet someone else owned it, had it pointed at chatgpt hoping they’d buy it, and just made a ton selling to Elon and crew for the vanity domain (which is pretty funny since x.ai is actually shorter).
Ai.com is such a better domain than x.ai. Still probably a waste of money to just redirect it.
.com matters now as many people know that is a very common ending of the url. Once years pass as people know about other possibilities, it matters less and less.
Plenty of people think that a url needs to have a .com to be correct, and the only time a different higher domain is used is when they go from a .com website(like google) or a bookmark/automatically opens. They just think of them like doors in a building. They have to go through a door to access the "other internet." (Go from a .com site to crossover to the other levels of the internet) while bookmarks and other methods are essentially literal shortcuts in a physical sense(even though they can type it into the address bar) equating a shortcut to a button on an elevator, etc.