X.com was an American

online bank Online banking, also known as internet banking, web banking or home banking, is an electronic payment system that enables customers of a bank or other financial institution to conduct a range of financial transactions through the financial insti ...

founded by Ed Ho, Harris Fricker,

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...

, and Christopher Payne in 1999 in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was ...

. It merged with competitor

Confinity Confinity Inc. was an American software company based in Silicon Valley, best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography comp ...

in 2000 and the merged company changed its name to

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

in 2001. Starting in 2023, the x.com

domain Domain may refer to: Mathematics *Domain of a function, the set of input values for which the (total) function is defined ** Domain of definition of a partial function **Natural domain of a partial function **Domain of holomorphy of a function *Do ...

began to be used for

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 and subsequently rebranded to X.

Business model

X.com developed and operated a financial services

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

with banking services provided by First Western National Bank, an

FDIC The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is one of two agencies that supply deposit insurance to depositors in American depository institutions, the other being the National Credit Union Administration, which regulates and insures cred ...

-insured bank in

La Jara, Colorado La Jara is a statutory town in Conejos County, Colorado, United States. The population was 818 at the 2010 United States Census. Geography La Jara is in the San Luis Valley region of Colorado. U.S. Route 285 passes through La Jara, leading nor ...

. The company was initially funded by Elon Musk and Greg Kouri, who went on to fund Musk's later ventures:

Tesla Tesla most commonly refers to: * Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), a Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor * Tesla, Inc., an American electric vehicle and clean energy company, formerly Tesla Motors, Inc. * Tesla (unit) (symbol: T), the SI-d ...

and

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and a satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal of ...

. Customers were not assessed fees or overdraft penalties. New member referrals were rewarded with a $20 cash card and a $10 card for each new sign-up. These features were unique for their time. For instance, customers could send money to another person by entering their email address into X.com. Additionally, customers could open an account strictly with online registration with no need to mail a

check Check or cheque, may refer to: Places * Check, Virginia Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Check'' (film), a 2021 Indian Telugu-language film * '' The Checks'' (episode), a 1996 TV episode of ''Seinfeld'' Games and sports * Check (chess), a th ...

History

Musk commented in a 1999 interview with

CBS MarketWatch MarketWatch is a website that provides financial information, business news, analysis, and stock market data. Along with ''The Wall Street Journal'' and ''Barron's'', it is a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, a property of News Corp. Histor ...

: "I think we're at the third stage now where people are ready to use the Internet as their main financial repository." In January 1999, Musk sold his company

Zip2 Zip2 was a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. The company was founded in Palo Alto, California as Global Link Information Network in 1995, by Greg Kouri and brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk. Initially, Glo ...

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

. A month later, Musk invested about $12 million into co-founding X.com in March 1999 with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. Fricker worked with Musk when Musk was an intern at the

Bank of Nova Scotia The Bank of Nova Scotia (french: link=no, Banque de Nouvelle-Écosse), operating as Scotiabank (french: link=no, Banque Scotia), is a Canadian multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. One of Canada ...

, Payne was a friend of Fricker, and Ho was an engineer at

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

and executive at Zip2. The company was initially run from a house before moving to an office in Palo Alto. Due to conflict on how to run the company, Musk fired Fricker five months after X.com had started, and the other two co-founders, Payne and Ho left consequently. X.com officially launched on December 7, 1999, with former

Intuit Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application Tu ...

CEO Bill Harris serving as the inaugural CEO. Within two months, X.com attracted over 200,000 signups. In January 2000, it was discovered that a security flaw allowed users of X.com who had the account number and bank routing number of any other bank account, even at other banks, could move money from that other account to their own and withdraw it. The problem existed for a month before it was discovered and corrected. In March 2000, X.com merged with its fiercest competitor Confinity, a software company also based in Palo Alto which had developed an easy payment system named

Paypal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

. The new company took PayPal's name. Musk was its biggest shareholder and was appointed as its CEO. Started in 1998, PayPal enabled users with

PalmPilot The PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional are the second generation of Palm PDA devices produced by Palm Inc (then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, later 3Com). These devices were launched on March 10, 1997. Accessories and pricing P ...

s to send money to each other through the devices'

infrared port The Infrared Data Association (IrDA) is an industry-driven interest group that was founded in 1994 by around 50 companies. IrDA provides specifications for a complete set of protocols for wireless infrared communications, and the name "IrDA" also ...

s. Subsequently, PayPal developed to allow users to send money using email and the web. In September 2000, when Musk was in Australia for a honeymoon trip, the X.com board voted for a change of CEO from Musk to

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Fac ...

, the co-founder of Confinity due to mismanagement on Musk's part. In June 2001, the x.com domain was changed to PayPal.com.

Domain name

In July 2017, PayPal sold the domain x.com back to Elon Musk. Starting in 2023, x.com began being used by

which had been acquired by Musk in 2022 and subsequently rebranded to X.

Business model

History

Domain name

References

External links

Further reading