The Ghost of X.com: Musk's 25-Year Revenge
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The Ghost of X.com: Musk's 25-Year Revenge
One letter, a lifelong obsession.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Niusi Ke, TechFlow
Some dreams don’t die—they just wait for the right moment.
The Stillbirth of 1999
In March 1999, in Palo Alto, 27-year-old Elon Musk made a decision that seemed almost absurd at the time.
He poured all $22 million he’d earned from selling Zip2 into a website called X.com.
This was Silicon Valley in the era of Yahoo and AOL—when the internet meant portal websites. To propose the idea of an “online bank” at this point was like selling rockets during the horse-drawn carriage age. But Musk’s vision for X.com went far beyond online banking—he wanted to build an online financial operating system: a single platform integrating all financial services—transfers, investments, loans, insurance, even daily spending.
To Silicon Valley, the young man from South Africa had clearly lost his mind.
This was the dial-up era, when connecting to the internet came with the screeching sound of modems, and loading a webpage could take half a minute. Asking users to make bank transfers over a 28.8K connection? It sounded like a joke.
The ambition was terrifying—but reality hit harder.
A year later, X.com merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity (the precursor to PayPal). What should have been a “genius alliance” turned into Silicon Valley’s version of *Game of Thrones*. Thiel’s Stanford-educated elite team despised Musk’s chaotic radicalism, viewing the engineer-turned-CEO as a dangerous lunatic.
In September 2000, the collapse came. Musk flew to Australia for his honeymoon. The moment his plane landed in Sydney—before he’d even left the airport—the board called: You’re out.
Peter Thiel took control. A few months later, the beloved “X.com” sign was torn down, and the company was rebranded as PayPal.
The foundation of the “financial empire” Musk had spent a year building was bulldozed by investment bankers in Brioni suits, leaving behind only one simple function: payments.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal. Musk walked away with $180 million. He won financially, but in that moment, he felt like a child robbed of his favorite toy. A fishbone lodged deep in his heart.
In the following two decades, he built the best electric cars, launched rockets into space, and swore he would die on Mars. Yet whenever someone mentioned PayPal, bitterness crept across his face.
X.com remained his lifelong obsession.
Bringing the Sink into Wall Street
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s headquarters holding a sink.
This detail was later widely reported by media, but the real signal was the message he posted on Twitter: "Let that sink in."
A double entendre: let the sink in, and let everything settle.
The world assumed he bought Twitter for free speech, or to defend Trump. They were wrong. Musk sought revenge—for the betrayal 25 years earlier.
The first step: rebranding.
X. One letter, carrying all his rage and ambition. Those who once mocked X.com as too ahead of its time would now witness its resurrection on this very platform.
But Musk was clever. He knew he couldn’t do it overnight—turning Twitter directly into a bank would scare users away. So he chose gradual transformation.
In early 2023, X was still primarily a lightweight social platform limited to 140-character posts. Musk first adjusted content strategy, encouraging original content and real-time discussions. Then came paid subscriptions, getting users accustomed to spending money on the platform.
By mid-year, long-form posts were introduced. Users could publish longer, deeper content—shifting X from a short-message square to an information hub.
Next came a major upgrade to video features. Musk aimed to make X a one-stop destination for information consumption, eliminating the need to jump to YouTube or other video sites.
By the end of 2023, the creator revenue-sharing program officially launched. An economic ecosystem began forming—users could earn income through content creation. This was a crucial step: cultivating user habits around transactions.
Then came the big moves of 2024.
Financial license applications, payment system development… Musk stopped hiding. He was turning X into a financial platform.
In January 2026, X product lead Nikita Bier announced: the platform is developing Smart Cashtags, allowing users to precisely link hashtags like $TSLA to specific assets or smart contracts.
Users can embed tags like $TSLA in tweets, displaying real-time stock prices. It appears to be just an information feature—but it’s actually the final piece of financialization.
Imagine: you see a tweet about NVIDIA’s new chip, the stock instantly jumps 5%, and you click the $NVDA tag to buy shares immediately.
Social, information, transaction—all in one. This was exactly the vision Musk had for X.com back in 1999.
From town square to information center, then to trading floor. In two years, Musk guided users step-by-step through X’s transformation.
To ease user concerns, Musk made an unprecedented move: open-sourcing all algorithms.
On January 10, 2026, Musk announced on X that the platform’s latest content recommendation algorithm—including both organic and ad recommendations—would be fully open-sourced within a week, updated every four weeks with developer notes.
Facebook, YouTube, TikTok—these platforms keep their recommendation algorithms as black boxes. No one knows why they see certain content. When financial services are involved, such opacity becomes a fatal flaw.
Musk broke the black box with open source. Users can inspect the code, developers can audit security, regulators can monitor compliance.
All to pave the way for financialization.
The Long-Overdue Validation
The original X.com died because it was born too early. Back then, the internet was still dial-up, broadband penetration below 10%. Online payments required over a dozen security verifications. People feared keeping money online.
Even more critical: the regulatory environment was extremely harsh. Banking regulators saw internet finance as a monster. Governments were still feeling their way forward. Musk’s aggressive approach was seen as reckless in that conservative era.
But history proved him right.
The validation simply came too late—and from an unexpected place: China.
In 2011, WeChat launched. Initially just a chat app, it quickly evolved into the super-app Musk had envisioned. Chatting, payments, ride-hailing, food ordering, wealth management—it could do it all. Alipay transformed from a simple third-party payment tool into a comprehensive financial platform.
Musk watched closely, impatiently.
In June 2022, during his first all-hands meeting with Twitter employees, he said publicly: “In China, people basically live on WeChat because it’s so useful and helpful for daily life. I think if we could achieve even a fraction of that on Twitter, it would be a massive success.”
It sounded like praise for WeChat—but it was also regret for his own failure 25 years prior. The Chinese had achieved in ten years what he had dreamed of in 1999.
Now it was his turn.
Mobile payments had reshaped global consumer habits. Cryptocurrencies had evolved from geek toys into pension fund investments. Blockchain technology made decentralized finance a reality. Regulators began embracing innovation.
The U.S. SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs. The EU launched its digital euro initiative. The People’s Bank of China piloted digital yuan.
Musk had waited 25 years for this moment.
With this context, Smart Cashtags make perfect sense. Musk’s real rival was never Zuckerberg.
Meta controls social connections. Google controls information indexing. Apple controls hardware access. But until now, no tech giant has truly controlled the global flow of money.
That is X’s endgame. Finance is the underlying protocol of commerce. Whoever controls the flow of capital controls the throat of the digital economy. That’s far more powerful than building a search engine or selling phones.
Musk is rebuilding an ultra-fast chain from “information” to “decision” to “action.” Imagine: Musk tweets about Tesla’s new technology. Within seconds, a hundred thousand people click the $TSLA tag. Algorithms analyze sentiment, predict price movements, automatically suggest trades, and users execute with one tap. Influence instantly converts into trading volume.
This is the financialization of social media. The traditional Wall Street model—analysts writing reports, brokers making calls—will look clumsy and expensive against algorithmic speed.
Back to the original question: why did Musk buy Twitter?
The answer was already public. On October 5, 2022, Musk tweeted: acquiring Twitter accelerated the development of the super app “X.”
Only now do we truly understand what he meant.
Dreams return to 1999. The ghost of X.com has finally found its moment to rise. This time, no one can stop him. He’s no longer the 27-year-old entrepreneur begging for approval—he’s the world’s richest man with absolute power.
Welcome to the X Universe
If we zoom out, beyond Wall Street fluctuations and Silicon Valley grudges, we see a far more chilling pattern.
Musk’s obsession with the letter “X” has long transcended branding—it’s become a near-pathological totem.
Look at what he’s done over the past two decades: When aiming to send humans to Mars, he named his company SpaceX; when designing Tesla’s flagship SUV, he insisted against all resistance on calling it Model X; when leaving OpenAI to build his own AI model, he named it xAI.
Even his favorite son is named X Æ A-12—whom he calls “Little X” in daily life.
In mathematics, X represents the unknown, infinite possibility. But in Musk’s life story, X is the only constant.
Twenty-five years ago, the young man kicked out of the PayPal board lost his X. Twenty-five years later, the world’s richest man—armed with rockets, cars, AI, and the planet’s largest public forum—has finally reclaimed that missing piece.
Everything—every action—is designed to make X happen.
Welcome to Musk’s X Universe.
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