By Bird Lovegod

Published 6th Oct 2023, 05:45 BST

And some have a gestation period that spans years, even decades in the planning. I’m thinking specifically of X.com, a particularly interesting and long term endeavor.

X.com started as an online bank, one of the very first, co-founded by Elon Musk in 1999. Elon had just exited from his first business, called Zip2, and had $25million to play with.

He bought a McLaren F1 car for a million dollars which he later crashed, and spent an unspecified multi million amount on the domain name X.com.

A phone displays the Twitter account for Elon Musk, showing the new logo for Twitter, and the website address X.com. Twitter has replaced the social media platform's famous bird logo with an X as part of owner Elon Musk's plans to create an "everything app".

He had a vision for it, a world changing online platform for all things financial.

In 1999 he used $12M to co-found exactly that, X.com the bank, which a couple of years later merged with their major competitor Confinity, who ran a platform called PayPal.

PayPal became the new brand, and X.com was sidelined. PayPal was then acquired by Ebay, and Elon once again achieved an exit, as the biggest single shareholder, this time with well over $100 million.

Elon Musk's long game with X is starting to come to fruition: Bird Lovegod