Company, Domain, Son: Elon Musk Explains 'Fixation' With Letter 'X'

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed his love for the letter 'X', dating it back to the 1990s. Appearing on the latest episode of Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's "WTF is?" podcast, Musk said that when he initially acquired the domain name 'X' in 1999, his idea was to "solve" money from an information theory standpoint. 

"It started with where I think way back in ancient times, in 99, the pre-Cambrian era, when there were only sponges. I think there were only three one-letter domain names, it was X, Q and Z. I was like, okay, I want to create this place where it's the financial crossroads or like the financial exchange," Musk said.

Musk said the current banking system is a large number of "heterogeneous databases" with batch processing that are not secure, adding that he wanted to solve money from an information theory standpoint, where "we could have a sort of a single database that was real-time and secure, that would be more efficient from a monetary and information theory standpoint". 

Musk said X.com became PayPal and was later acquired by eBay, revealing that someone reached out from eBay and asked if he would like to buy the domain name back. "I was like, maybe acquiring Twitter would also be an opportunity to revisit the original plan of X.com, which is to create this clearing house of financial transactions, like basically to create a more efficient money database," he said. 

Comparing X to China's WeChat, Musk said, "People kind of live their life on WeChat in China, and it's quite useful, but there's no real WeChat outside of China. So it's kind of WeChat++ is the idea for X." 

Regarding one of his companies, SpaceX, Musk said, "Space Exploration Technologies is the full name of the company, but I was like, that's too much. That's a mouthful. We'll just call it SpaceX, like FedEx for space. It just hasn't happened to have X because exploration has an X. I like the idea of capitalising the X just artistically. So that's why it's SpaceX.

Talking about his son Lil X aka X Æ A-Xii, Musk said that it was the child's mother who suggested the name. "We got a kid, he's called X2. His mother is the one who named him X. I said, 'You know, people are really going to think I've got a thing about X if we name our kid X2. Look, I do have X.com, you know. So, people are going to really think I've got a somewhat of a fetish for this letter.' But she said she likes X and she wants to call him X," Musk said.