Elon Musk announced on Sunday that he would be giving Twitter a major makeover: changing its name to “X” and doing away with its famous bird logo.
He tweeted, “Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
It’s all part of his overarching plan to transform X into an “everything app”, much like China’s WeChat, which handles everything from payments to messaging to micro-blogging.
X.com
Musk, one of the world's richest men, co-founded the online banking service X.com in 1999, but not everyone was enthusiastic about the name.
According to Ashlee Vance, author of the 2015 biography ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, his fascination with the letter began with one of his earliest ventures.
"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," she revealed.
X.com merged with competitor, Confinity Inc., in 2000 and the name was changed to the family-friendly PayPal.
And yet Musk clearly wasn’t able to let go of his brainchild. So, in 2017, he bought the url "X.com" back off PayPal, tweeting that the domain "has great sentimental value,” as NPR notes.
Now, if you type “X.com” into your web browser, you will be directed to the Twitter – soon to be X – homepage.
SpaceX
After making his first fortune with the sale of his tech company Zip2 for $307 million (around £240 million) in 1999, and PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion (around £1.32 billion), the universe was the limit for Musk.
The same year he sold PayPal, he founded his space flight company Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
However, the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so it was abbreviated to SpaceX.
Tesla X
While Musk opted for three alternative consonants in the name of his electric car company (which he started in 2003), he eventually couldn’t resist adding a touch of X.
Tim Higgins, author of ‘Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century’, explained that Musk had cheeky intentions when choosing the names of his models. The idea was that, combined, they would spell out the word “sexy," Higgins said.
However, another car company – Ford – threw a spanner in the works thanks to its ownership of the rights to the “E” model.
Musk, therefore, had to settle on calling his second model “3” – a "kind of a backwards E," as Higgins pointed out – to semi-achieve his desired acronym.
But yes, there are now S, 3, X and Y models of the cars.
X Æ A-12
In 2020, Musk and his then-partner, Grimes, welcomed a baby boy, calling him X Æ A-12. And giving him the nickname "Little X".
Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, explained via tweet that the X part of her son’s name refers to the “unknown variable” in algebra.
Two years later, the then-couple announced that they’d had a baby girl via surrogate, naming her Exa Dark Sideræl.
xAI
Musk was a co-founder and early funder of the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI. However, he's grown increasingly critical of the company with last year’s release of ChatGPT.
In April, the billionaire criticized ChatGPT in an interview with Tucker Carlson, telling the then-Fox News host that the chatbot had a liberal bias and that he planned an alternative that would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
On 12 July this year, the 52-year-old announced the formation of a new company called xAI.
It's goal is simple, according to its website: "To understand the true nature of the universe."
The new startup, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has hired a group of top AI researchers who formerly worked at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.
X - the new Twitter
Weeks before forking out the $44 billion (around £34 million) to buy Twitter in October, Musk tweeted that the eye-watering purchase was simply “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app".
"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,” the billionaire’s biographer Vance explained to NPR.
“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.”
On Monday (24 July), he retweeted a message from his newly-appointed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, which read: “It’s an exceptionally rare thing – in life or in business – that you get a second chance to make another big impression. Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the global town square."
She continued: “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. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”
In a recent interview, he commented that "X" would serve people's financial needs to such a degree that, over time, it would become half of the global financial system - or at least the largest financial institution. He called it, "The most efficient database for money with the least amount of fraud."
So why X?
Musk suggested that he’d chosen “X” to replace Twitter because he wanted something that “embod[ies] the imperfections in us all that make us unique”.
The letter has a number of different spiritual, cultural and mathematical meanings. It not only represents the "unknown variable" in algebra, but it is used in phonics to replicate a number of different sounds.
It not only signifies the end of something, or death, (like the "X" in a skull and crossbones emblem, or the crosses on the eyes of dead cartoons) but it also signifies an error or cancellation, that which is negative.
The letter "X" is also associated with euphemism. Like "X-rated" or XXX.
Musk is also part of Generation "X" (anyone born from 1965-1980).
Most uniquely, the letter X has long been recognized as an occult symbol for Satan.
**The Satanic connection is the most interesting, in my opinion. In a previous post, I connected Elon Musk to potentially being the creator of numerous technologies capable of bringing forth the mark of the beast and the beast system.
From Neuralink - his brain/machine interface that intends to connect humans to machines... to his instrumental role in A.I. technology... to his Starlink Satellites that are capable of providing cell coverage to every person on the planet, including in the remotest of locations.
Combine this with his new purchase of one of the largest social networking sites in the world, along with the fact that his goal is to transform it into the largest financial system in existence.
Basically, he can track you on the planet from his satellites, he can track you digitally through A.I... and there may soon come a day when all of your financial transactions will be tracked through his new social networking platform.
If that doesn't sound like the Mark of the Beast, I don't know what else would.
He's been known for wearing Halloween costumes called "The Devil's Champion"... and wearing outfits to the Met Gala with the phrase "Novus Ordo Seclorum" embroidered on them. Novus Ordo Seclorum is a Latin phrase taken from the ancient prophetess of the Roman god Apollo, predicting his eventual return. The spirit of Apollo has long been prophesied in scripture to possess the Antichrist.
As I shared in episode 27, Musk may even have a history of occult training.
So the fact that he leans towards the letter X, along with having these other connections - tells me that his fascination with X may serve a darker purpose.
תגובות