Musk founds X.com, the online bank that became PayPal
Elon Musk's second company aimed to reinvent banking online, and after a merger it grew into PayPal.
Archive entry. This article looks back at an event from March 1999. It was drafted with AI assistance from public records and is being fact-checked. See our About page.
Soon after Zip2 was sold, Elon Musk used part of the proceeds to found X.com in March 1999. The company set out to offer financial services online, including email-based payments.
In March 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, a rival start-up whose PayPal service let people send money by email and from Palm devices. Tension between the two teams over the product and the company's direction was well publicized, and in September 2000 the board replaced Musk as CEO with Peter Thiel.
In 2001 the company took the PayPal name. eBay bought it the next year, and Musk, still a large shareholder, used his proceeds to found SpaceX.
The name returns
Musk kept a fondness for the letter. He later bought the X.com domain back and, in 2023, used it as the new name for the platform formerly known as Twitter.
