Paypal initially X.com? How PayPal really started and the Journey of people being X'd out while it was Twitter! Elon Musk History!
According to Encyclopedia.com
Palo Alto, California-based X.com served as one of the first online banking sites from its launch in December 1999 through October of 2001, when founder Elon Musk decided to shut down its operations. The firm merged with online payment services provider PayPal in March of 2000, and those operations are what remain of X.com. The largest Internet-based payment network in the world, PayPal offers its services to roughly 8 million customers, many of whom use the online payment provider to conduct person-to-person (P2P) transactions on auction site eBay.
X.com was created by the 28-year-old founder ofZip2 Corp., Elon Musk, in late 1999. Musk envisioned X.com as a full-scale banking and investment services site that offered everything from checking accounts to insurance services, mortgage lending, and bonds. He hired investment banker John Story as executive vice president and former Intuit Corp. CEO Bill Harris as president and CEO. Musk took on the role of chairman. The firm employed 15 staff members when the site-powered by Sanchez Computers Associates' e-PROFILE Internet bank solution—became operational. Roughly $25 million in venture capital had come from Musk and Harris, as well as from Sequoia Capital.
To attract new clients, X.com offered $20 to anyone who opened a free online checking account. Members who referred new customers to X.com were awarded $10 for each referral. Instant credit was also available to those who qualified. To make money, the firm planned to do what traditional lenders did—rely on the interest rate spreads between what it earned on loans and what it paid on accounts. Within two months, X.com had secured 100,000 customers, compared to Etrade Telebank, the largest World Wide Web-based bank, with 130,000 customers. However, according to Forbes columnist Elizabeth Corcoran, cash incentives were not enough to ease consumer fears regarding virtual banking, particularly after X.com was forced to admit its initial site design hadallowed for fraud. "In January X.com conceded that it had designed its system in a way that made it too easy to siphon other people's money into an X.com account from traditional bank accounts. X.com detected about half a dozen questionable transfers and the money was returned." To prevent this from happening in the future, the firm required new clients to submit a canceled check if they planned to withdraw money from an account.
In March 2000, X.com merged with PayPal, which had been in operation since November of 1999, retaining the X.com name. At the time, PayPal was brining in nearly 15,000 new clients a day with its P2P payment services. To register, PayPal visitors were simply asked to input their name, daytime phone number, home address, and email address. PayPal members were then able to email funds to any other PayPal account holder via an automated email message titled, "You've Got Cash!" The funds could be charged to a credit card via an online form at the Pay-Pal site, or they could be withdrawn from a bank account, providing the user had supplied adequate verification of account ownership.
In June, X.com expanded PayPal services to allow for payments between businesses and consumers (B2C), including those made on cell phones. Clients who deposited funds into an X.com account by electronic fund transfer, credit card transfer, or check, were able to pay bills either at the X.com Web site or by pushing the letter "x" on their cell phones and then entering the email address of the payee. Businesses that accepted payments made via PayPal were assessed no monthly fee, compared to the typical 2.9 percent fee charged by credit card firms. Instead, Pay-Pal levied a 1.9 percent charge for each transaction completed, compared to the industry standard of 30 cents per credit card transaction.
Management differences prompted Harris to leave just six months after joining the new firm. The following month, X.com began offering online payment services on the Evite.com event planning Web site. As a result, Evite users in the U.S. could make a payment at the same time they responded to an online invitation. X.com 's P2P customers grew to exceed 3 million in August. It was then that the firm began focusing on business-to-business (B2B) payments, wanting to penetrate that market as well as it had the P2P market. As a result, X.com forged a deal with BuyLink Corp., a San Francisco-based online marketplace that served roughly 8,300 retailers and 3,000 manufacturers. Using the PayPal service, BuyLink users were able to make instant payments to one another. The firm faced more negative publicity when 125 PayPal users who bought computer hard drives at an online auction failed to receive what they had purchased. This, along with the fact that the value of transactions conducted over PayPal were increasing, prompted X.com to begin offering fraud protection, similar to the protection offered by credit card companies.
As part of its new Cybersource Fraud Scan, the firm also put in place a member information guide, which allowed buyers to verify that sellers had been reviewed by X.com.
In October, Musk "launched a major redirection of the company's strategy," wrote American Banker columnist Megan J. Ptacek. "Rather than offer a wide range of banking and related services, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will become solely a global payment system." By then PayPal was serving 4 million P2P customers and handled roughly 50 percent of the transactions conducted on auction powerhouse eBay. As a result of Musk's decision, X.com reversed its plans to buy First Western National Bank, a purchase that had been planned as a means to gain Federal Deposit Insurance for its virtual accounts. To increase its foothold in the B2C and B2B markets, X.com began working on forging alliances with insurance firms, banks, and other financial institutions. Via a five-year agreement with Intuit Inc., X.com gained exclusive rights to provide online payment services to the three million small business customers using Intuit technology. Eventually, X.com officially changed its name to PayPal.
International expansion efforts, which included allowing Internet users outside the U.S. to open Pay-Pal accounts, began late in 2000. For example, PayPal and financial services powerhouse ING Group began working to extend email payment services throughout Europe. By March of 2001, the firm had expanded its reach to 26 countries. That month, PayPal put together a listing of 5,600 "PayPal Shops," which allowed shoppers to easily locate merchants that accepted Pay-Pal payments. In June, PayPal and Providian Corp. began offering a credit card that rewarded PayPal members with various perks. Efforts to increase B2B and B2C operations continued into 2001.
X.com was an online bank founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. In 2000, it merged with competitor Confinity and in 2001, the merged company changed its name to PayPal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/25/elon-musk-paypal-twitter-x-rebrand/
In 2000, Musk had become CEO after the merger of his X.com and Confinity, the venture-backed company co-founded by Peter Thiel that owned the PayPal program that was a more popular money-transfer service than the one offered by Musk. After Thiel resigned following a rift over Musk pushing for the PayPal system to go on a Microsoft platform instead of Unix-based software, Musk wanted to broaden the company’s ambitions as more than just a money-transfer service by making the letter X more prominent in its branding and phasing out the PayPal name altogether, according to Max Chafkin, author of the 2021 book, “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.”
“X had conducted a series of focus groups showing customers disliked the brand name, because it reminded them of porn,” Chafkin wrote.
Author Walter Isaacson echoed that account in excerpts he shared this week of his upcoming biography on Musk due out in September.
“PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid,” Isaacson wrote. “Focus groups showed that the name X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company.”
Musk’s vision would not last long. Thiel and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin orchestrated a coup against Musk when he was on his first vacation in years. The board ousted Musk as CEO and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000, according to author Ashlee Vance’s 2015 book, “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” Thiel formally renamed the combined company PayPal in 2001.
“That’s the problem with vacations,” Musk told Fortune in 2007.
Musk’s rise and fall at PayPal is being reexamined as the Twitter owner is changing the name of the influential social media platform to X. As Twitter began removing its name from its corporate headquarters Monday, critics and marketing experts are noting that the move was an unnecessary gamble on a hazy future for a platform that had wide brand recognition from its blue bird logo.
Critics on Twitter have joked that the logo for the rebranded X — one that Musk promises to make into an “everything app” — is indistinguishable from the logos of several pornography sites. Chafkin noted that history is repeating itself for Musk and his love for X.com, which is now where Twitter users are redirected when they type in Twitter.com.
“Others have pointed this out, but this renaming is stepping on the exact same rake that got him ousted by PayPal,” Chafkin posted.
The merger between X.com and Confinity unfolded in 2000 to avoid competition between the two online financial services and also to “create the world’s largest secure network for instant online payments,” according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The combined company had kept the X.com name, and Musk, who had been replaced as CEO of X.com by the end of 1999, was chosen to lead the company after the merger.
Musk and Thiel appeared to initially be on the same page as part of a group of employees that referred to themselves as the “PayPal Mafia.” They were seen smiling together in an Associated Press photo shoot of the two of them with a computer showing the X PayPal logo in 2000.
But the two would clash over Musk’s micromanaging over technology and branding, biographers say. That uneasy feeling spilled over to the employees on both sides of the merger, culminating in Musk’s desire to put everything on a Microsoft platform instead of Unix.
“He’s one of those guys who can be larger than the room,” Levchin said of Musk to Inc. Magazine in 2007.
Branding was also a point of emphasis for Musk to put his mark on the company, according to Vance. When Thiel left, the employees that were loyal to him thought it was “insanity” after hearing that Musk wanted to eliminate the PayPal name during a time when sellers on eBay had turned the company’s name into a verb, Chafkin reported in “The Contrarian.” That kind of name branding was “a landmark achievement for any start-up,” Chafkin wrote, but Musk wasn’t having it.
“Musk kept championing X.com, while most everyone else favored PayPal,” Vance wrote.
Added Isaacson from his upcoming book: “Musk insisted that the company’s name should be X.com, with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands. He even tried to rebrand the payment system X-PayPal.”
Even after the focus groups results came back that had people confusing the company for a porn site, Musk did not waver in his belief that the X.com name would work.
“Musk was unmoved, possibly, employees gossiped, because of sunk costs,” Chafkin wrote. “He’d paid at least $1 million to acquire the X.com domain name, legend within the company had it.”
Isaacson recounted Musk’s confidence in the name on Twitter this week.
“If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” Musk said, according to Isaacson. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”
What happened next in 2000 was described by Vance as “one of the nastiest coups in Silicon Valley’s long, illustrious history of nasty coups.” At a bar in Palo Alto, Calif., a small group of employees led by Thiel, Levchin and PayPal COO David O. Sacks gathered to discuss how they could push out Musk, reported Fortune and the 2015 book.
“They decided to sell the board on the idea of Thiel returning as CEO,” Vance wrote. “Instead of confronting Musk directly with this plan, the conspirators decided to take action behind Musk’s back.”
Musk had planned a two-week honeymoon trip with his first wife, Justine, to Australia in September 2000, months after they got married. It was going to be a fundraising trip for Musk to meet with potential investors, and the couple could also catch the Summer Olympics in Sydney.
But as Musk was boarding a flight, he was notified that X.com executives had delivered letters of no confidence to the board of directors, according to Vance. The board decided that Musk’s lack of a cohesive business model and the technological issues at the company were too much to overcome. Musk was out and Thiel was returning to replace him as CEO.
“Despite having perhaps the greatest entrepreneurial streak of all the PayPal mafia, Musk was purged from PayPal like some kind of toxin,” journalist Jeffrey M. O’Brien wrote in Fortune.
When asked by Inc. what he remembers of the coup that pushed him out, Musk smirked and replied, “It was like unicorns and rainbows, flower-filled meadows.” He said in 2007 that he was hurt by how he got pushed out, but claimed to have “buried their hatchet.”
“Life is too short for long-term grudges,” Musk told Inc.
After Thiel renamed the combined company as PayPal, eBay acquired the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock. And Musk benefited from the PayPal name he wanted to do away with. Since he was still the company’s largest shareholder with nearly 12 percent of shares, Musk made roughly $176 million from the sale, according to Vance and an SEC filing.
Despite his failure to rebrand PayPal into X.com, Musk never gave up hope for his favorite letter. In 2017, he thanked PayPal for letting him buy back the domain name that some confused for adult content and was partially responsible for his ouster at the company.
“No plans right now,” he said at the time, “but it has great sentimental value to me.”
I, Melissa McGarity the sole wrirter and creator of artistiquejewelry and TestingTheNarrative
and having been X'd out from X formerly known as twitter
when under Jack Dorsey for dropping truth bombs and showing verified connections
WITH full sources of how these self appointed elites interact and perpetrate
through numerous crimes against humanity
WHILE posing through virtue signaling the Very Opposite of what they are doing~
To see the History of #ElonMusk go here,
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See more on #PeterThiell by scrolling down in here,
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See more connecting articles here,
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