X Æ A-12 Musk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2020
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A brief biography of 'X,' the letter that Elon Musk has plastered everywhere
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Elon Musk tweeted that he'd picked Twitter's next CEO: Linda Yaccarino, who oversaw advertising at NBCUniversal for more than a decade.
"Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app," he wrote on Friday.
Musk had teased the announcement a day earlier, tweeting: "I've hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!"
Musk has tacked the letter X onto his business ventures and more. But the billionaire hasn't given much explanation as to what it means.
"X," Musk tweeted in April.
Days earlier, a filing in a federal court case in California confirmed Twitter had been folded into X Corp.
According to biographers, the letter X frames where Musk's ambitions are headed, while paying homage to Musk's entrepreneurial start.
X.com, the bank where it began
According to Ashlee Vance, the author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk's obsession with the letter X began with one of the billionaire's earliest ventures, X.com, which later merged with a competitor to become PayPal.
"Everyone tried to talk him out of naming the company that back then because of the sexual innuendos, but he really liked it and stuck with it," said Vance.
In 2017, Musk repurchased the url "X.com" from PayPal, tweeting that the domain "has great sentimental value."
X, the Tesla model
"X marks the spot in a lot of ways for Elon Musk," said Tim Higgins, a Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century. "It's kind of this common theme throughout."
The letter X became the name of Tesla's third model, which debuted in 2015.
"The idea being that the Tesla models would spell out the word 'sexy,'" Higgins said. But Ford owns the right to the Model E, which is why Musk later settled on the Model 3, "kind of a backwards E," he said.
X, the first letter of his youngest son's name
In 2020, Musk and his then-partner, Grimes, welcomed a son via surrogate, naming him X Æ A-12 Musk. (Æ is pronounced "ash," Musk told controversial podcast host Joe Rogan.)
The couple named their second child, a girl, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk. (It's now been changed to "Y.")
X, the everything app
But lately, "X" has referred to Musk's newest ambition, building an "everything app" akin to China's popular WeChat, which doesn't yet have a U.S.-parallel.
"He wants to create an app similar to how WeChat is used in China, where it's part of the fabric of day-to-day life. You use it to communicate, to consume news, to buy things, to pay your rent, to book appointments with your doctor and even to pay fines," said Vance.
Vance says following the WeChat model makes sense with what Musk wants for Twitter. "The company clearly needs a new, bigger business if it's to make the type of money that would justify his investment and satisfy his ambition," he said.
Weeks before he shelled out $44 billion to acquire Twitter in October, Musk tweeted, "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app."
X...?
But Musk's obsession with the letter X is still something of a mystery even to his biographers, like Higgins.
"Whether it's kind of mysterious, like something pulled from a comic book, or 'X marks the spot,' it's hard to know with him," Higgins said. "It also just kind of sounds cool."
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