Elon Musk’s SpaceX will go public next month. While the surrounding hype has boosted other space-related stocks, this listing represents much more than a rocket company starting on the public market. Prior to its IPO, SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI startup, xAI, which itself already owned X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In recent years, SpaceX has also expanded beyond rocket production into telecommunications through its Starlink facility. The Nasdaq-listed company is a combination of rocket and satellite manufacturing, internet services, AI research, data centers and social media all under one conglomerate valued at $1.75 trillion.
This new incarnation of SpaceX is the latest manifestation of Musk’s lifelong desire to build an all-encompassing business empire under the brand “X”.
That idea dates back to 1999, when Musk used his initial fortune from Zip2 to launch an online bank called X.com, a precursor to PayPal. IX.com was intended to radically reshape the global financial system by managing banking, brokerage and insurance all in one place.
The company was later merged with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s Confinity to form what would become PayPal. The merger sparked a heated internal debate about marketing. Musk pushed to keep X.com, saying “PayPal” sounded too small and limited, according to Jimmy Soni’s 2022 book, Founders: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the PayPal Story. Thiel and Levchin liked “PayPal” for its clear connection to the company’s core service, and focus groups found “X.com” vague or suggestive of adult content. After Musk was ousted as CEO, the new leadership renamed the company PayPal.
In 2017, Musk paid an undisclosed but large sum to regain the X.com domain. At the time, he described it as a “great sensitivity advantage,” despite having no immediate plans to use it.
According to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of the entrepreneur, Musk had laid out a detailed business plan in 1999: to create a platform that would combine social media, news, e-commerce and personal finance into a single, seamless system—similar to China’s WeChat.
That idea began to take shape in late 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He described the purchase as a way to speed up the construction of “X” by several years. Soon after, he renamed the parent company X Corp. and reinvented the platform itself as X.
Elon Musk’s concern with the letter “X”
Musk is known for his many hobbies, including liking the numbers 420 and 69. His fixation on the book “X” is integrated throughout his business empire. SpaceX itself is a stylized acronym for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.” That opens the mouth. We’ll just call it SpaceX…I love the idea of making a capital X just creatively,” Musk told Nikhil Kamath’s “WTF is?” podcast in 2025.
He traced that passion back to the late 1990s, when he was looking for a name for his online finance business. “There were only three one-letter domain names: X, Q and Z. I was like, okay, I want to create this place where it’s a financial intersection—or like a financial exchange,” he said on the same podcast.
The motif extends to his other businesses and even his personal life. Musk named Tesla’s luxury SUV the Model X and named the book after one of his sons, X Æ A-Xii, often referred to as “X” or “Lil X.”
