Elon Musk Has Tried Rebranding As X Earlier than, And Final Time It Didn't Go So Nicely

Even in his 20s, when Musk was working within the Canadian monetary world, he seemed to take huge swings and earn cash by disrupting the system. He co-founded X.com, an FDIC-insured on-line financial institution, which was nonetheless a novel thought on the time. 

By working digitally, in addition to instituting concepts that conventional brick-and-mortar establishments prevented, Musk envisioned X.com as the way forward for banking. Quickly after, the corporate merged with a competitor — Peter Thiel’s Confinity — and have become PayPal. PayPal was then acquired by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and Musk moved on to different ventures.

Musk’s time with X.com was short-lived, however he earned loads of detractors. There was a variety of pushback from the corporate towards Musk’s robust want to maintain the identify “X” over the brand new “PayPal” branding. Traders additionally did not love a few of his high-risk, disruptive concepts, which have been much less fitted to a significant monetary firm than within the tech world. 

Clients have been additionally sad with companies as Musk instituted restrictions to economize, like a $1000 lifetime spending restrict for PayPal customers. Moreover, workers complained of harsh working situations and poisonous conduct by Musk, and finally pressured him out as CEO.

For those who’ve been following the goings-on at Twitter since Musk took over in 2022, then a variety of this would possibly sound acquainted. Twitter customers have been sad with Musk’s controversial modifications, and Twitter workers have complained about equally poor working situations, like having to sleep within the workplace. The most recent change additionally echoes what occurred at PayPal: Musk’s aspiration to call the corporate “X.”