Elon Musk’s SpaceX is set to go public next month. While the hype around it has lifted other space-related stocks, this listing represents far more than a rocket company debuting on the public market. Ahead of its IPO filing, SpaceX acquired Musk’s A.I. startup, xAI, which itself had already absorbed X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. In recent years, SpaceX has also expanded beyond rocket manufacturing into telecommunications through its Starlink division. The company coming to Nasdaq is one that wraps rocket and satellite production, internet services, A.I. research, data centers and social media all under a single conglomerate valued at $1.75 trillion.
This new incarnation of SpaceX is the latest manifestation of Musk’s lifelong ambition to build an all-encompassing business empire under the “X” brand.
That vision dates back to 1999, when Musk used his first fortune from Zip2 to launch an online bank called X.com, a precursor to PayPal. X.com was meant to radically reshape the global financial system by handling banking, brokerage and insurance all in one place.
The company later merged with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s Confinity to form what would become PayPal. The merger sparked a fierce internal debate over branding. Musk pushed to retain X.com, arguing that “PayPal” sounded too narrow and limiting, according to Jimmy Soni’s 2022 book, The Founders: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the Story of PayPal. Thiel and Levchin favored “PayPal” for its clearer connection to the company’s core service, and focus groups found “X.com” vague or even suggestive of adult content. After Musk was ousted as CEO, the new leadership quickly rebranded the company as PayPal.
In 2017, Musk paid an undisclosed but substantial sum to reacquire the X.com domain. At the time, he described it as having “great sentimental value,” despite having no immediate plans for its use.
According to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of the entrepreneur, Musk had already outlined 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 ecosystem—similar to China’s WeChat.
That vision began to take shape in late 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He described the purchase as a way to accelerate the creation of “X” by several years. Soon after, he renamed the parent company X Corp. and rebranded the platform itself as X.
Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter “X”
Musk is known for his many quirky obsessions, including his fondness for the numbers 420 and 69. His fixation on the letter “X” is woven throughout his business empire. SpaceX itself is a stylized shorthand for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.”That’s a mouthful. We’ll just call it SpaceX…I like the idea of capitalizing the X just artistically,” Musk said on Nikhil Kamath’s “WTF is?” podcast in 2025.
He has traced that preference back to the late 1990s, when he was searching for a name for his online financial venture. “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 the financial crossroads—or like the 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 incorporated the letter into one of his sons’ names, X Æ A-Xii, who is commonly referred to as “X” or “Lil X.”
