Long before Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter Inc. in 2022, he talked about building an all-encompassing service called “X.” In typical Musk fashion, the concept was expansive and amorphous. Then over a weekend in July 2023, he changed Twitter’s name and logo to X. It was the start of the billionaire’s vision to transform the social media platform into something of a holy grail of the online age — what Musk calls “the everything app.”

Musk has shown a personal affinity with the letter X. He’s compared his ambitions for Twitter with the vision he had for another entity called X.com, a financial services company he founded in 1999 that ultimately became PayPal Holdings Inc. When he was CEO, Musk wanted to broaden the platform and phase out the PayPal name, a move that ultimately led to his ousterBloomberg Terminal. Musk has tweeted that buying Twitter was “an accelerant” to creating X. That could mean evolving the public messaging service into something much broader, including a one-stop shop for financial services. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino said when the company’s name was changed.

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