Elon Musk; the thread up top about him has some discussion about him being an interesting human being; there is literally a book about him.
The domain name x.com: It's interesting that something happened X.com as most of the other 26 single character domain names are reserved and won't be sold.
The history of it; Paypal, the previous owner of X.com and started by Elon Musk is a well known internet commerce success story; many readers not only have Paypal accounts, but also complex opinions of their service, and may even have worked there at one point.
Tantalizingly, as Elon Musk "enthusiastically" now owns X.com and has done other cool stuff in his life, it's interesting to fantasize about what might sort of content, if anything, Elon Musk will put up at X.com.
Finally, this is an article on TechCruch, and we're suckers for anything they post.
None of that might be as interesting as, say, "taking control of all .io domains with a targeted registration", but that has about 10x the points (1068 to this post's 104), but each upvote adds 1 point and is then plugged into the mysterious frontpage algorithm.
Elon Musk buying X.com isn't going to keep me up at night going wild with possibility, but it's really a human interest story and we're not robots. He owned this back in 1999; where where you then, where are you, and where do you think will you be, 18 years from now?
Hrmm, I tried a whois for a few (a, g, t, e) and they're just not registered: "organisation: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority".
Is IANA sitting on them?
edit: Oh, from the wiki [1]: "In 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved all single-letter and single-digit second-level domain names in the top-level domains com, net, and org, and grandfathered those that had already been assigned."
"...with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the Alphabet."
Funny that z.com redirects to trade.z.com - it's like, someone realised that actually, a single letter is too short to build a brand.
If we weren't excited by silly things like single letter domain names, x.com could be owned by whoever makes the 'xcom' game, and it would just be a mildly 'good' or amusing domain name, like when .io, .sh, .ly, etc. work out particularly well.
Elon Musk is the greatest PR savant of our generation. I mean, he's an absolutely outstanding entrepreneur, genius engineer and fascinating technologist. But, wow. His personal brand carries so much weight, I'm definitely interested in learning about the PR people and / or firms behind his success.
Buying a single-letter domain is impressive, to say the least.
But a whole TechCrunch article, headlining with your face and name, because you tweeted about a domain name purchase for sentimental value is really next level. How did he manage to build such an impressive cognitive footprint in a world that's constantly fighting for your attention and ad revenue?
(... but then again, in the world of domain name purchases, I'm sure we'd all share a laugh if Sean Parker and / or Justin Timberlake bought "thefacebook.com" from Facebook.)
Who else is creating exciting companies such as Tesla, OpenAI, Neuralink, and SpaceX? I can't think of anyone else who has started such exciting companies. No need for a PR firm at that point.
Literally thousands of researchers, professors, entrepreneurs and engineers.
You know of those four (and can't think of anyone else!) because Elon Musk sold his vision to investors, employees, and the public through impressive salesmanship and an obscene amount of both grit and persistence. He aggregated resources and did what you do when you accumulate wealth for business purposes; he spent it to forward his goals. Some of which went towards impressive PR stunts and people wrangling.
I'm guessing he meant who's creating all those kind of companies at the same time. There's definitely thousands of peoples/companies working on those same problems/markets.
I'm going to call bullshit on the PR sotext of it. Musk had THE most successful internet finance company originally with PayPal, then parlayed that into extremely risky, potentially world-changing bets with SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, and others.
Musk gets such great PR because the stuff he's done is actually an order of magnitude more impressing than others who have done "similar" things.
It's pretty analogous to people saying Steve Jobs had "amazing PR". It's easy to have amazing PR when you have amazing products, and so many of Apple's products (the Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) really were game changers in terms of functionality and usability.
PR isn't something you "get", it's something you actively work for. Conference appearances, press releases, interviews, television spots, documentary participation... these all take time, energy and planning. Yes, as you get more and more well-known these opportunities appear spontaneously, but it doesn't make them any less time-consuming - I would argue the opposite, they become an increasingly important commitment. Elon undoubtedly hustled for a lot of this stuff on his own, but I would be extremely surprised if he hasn't been supported by at least tens of individuals (and / or firms) over the years just for his personal brand alone (not including company-specific PR that's run by internal marketing teams).
The thing is; the entire point of his PR, no matter who helps perpetuate it, is built to craft the very opinion you have: Elon is amazing, and he can do it all on his own. While that's probably true to a large extent, it's not the only "truth" and reality. I, personally, am interested in the stories of the people who have helped him along the way - however few or many there may be.
I see your point but you're falling into circular logic, with PR becoming the answer to any question concerning his success. It's likely the case that great PR resulted from extraordinary products and those products succeeded from both solvIng problems and well, great PR.
Musk actually builds things that no one else is, over and over again. It gets written about because he's accomplishing results - it's different than just having ideas. I have ideas, but I never built them out in the world.
I think that totally misses the point. Yes, there have been other electric cars. There have been no other electric cars that have integrated such great functionality in such a desirable body. Musk proved electric cars could be cool. Same thing goes for private spaceflight. There are other private spaceflight companies, but no others are doing as much to advance the reduction of launch costs.
Again, it's similar to the argument some people make that the iPod was just another MP3 player, or the iPhone was just another phone.
isn't it more like Richard Branson or Larry Ellison. I mean I can't imagine Elon spending so much money on such poor things like Yacht or private island. :)
That's stuff he did on the side. A major part of Iron Man and RDJ in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is his intense work ethic and intelligence with building the suit among other edgy tech stuff. Elon seems best suited.
I love Elon Musk. Calling me a fanboy is an understatement. But yeah agree with what you say. His PR and brand are top notch. The article is indeed not really needed.
He feels like the individual equivalent to Google in the 00s and early parts of this decade when they were close to being infallible in the eyes of the general public and especially to the tech community.
He also has what I imagine to be 'Howard Hughes' heroic-visionary-craziness (from before the pain relief medication turned Howard Hughes actually crazy). Like most people here I was not around when Howard Hughes was, however, having an Elon Musk around on planet earth right now does make you wonder what times must have been like at the start of aviation or motoring when there were apparently more popular visionary geniuses around getting stuff done.
I also think Elon Musk is reminiscent of the early railway pioneers - Brunel and Stephenson's son spring to mind.
Yea I noticed that when I read it. I hate it when they do that. It's sorta click-baity, but that's not the right word as you're already reading the article. I guess misleading for .. dramatic effect? Stupid effect?
Chump change for sure. But most of his net worth will prob be tied up in Tesla and SpaceX for a while. That $15B net worth number seems low actually. Forbes doesn't specify what they estimate his SpaceX stake at. Nor how much he has outside of those two stakes.
A little over 20% of Tesla is around $11B. A little over 50% of SpaceX is $7B to $8B (SpaceX hasn't been given a valuation for almost two years now). That's already close to $20B.
I recall when I was at PayPal, which owned x.com at the time, there were a few people who had x.com email addresses internally. It was considered a prestigious novelty.
I also recall pitching to various folks to use the domain as a URL shortener, but people rolled their eyes. Always felt like a missed opportunity to me, although I admit it was a kind of gimmicky idea.
Hah that's cool. X.com could've been a bigger version of tinyurl and bitly when both were at their peak. In the bigger picture, still small stuff though like you sort of alluded to.
bit.ly for a while let you use j.mp which was even shorter than x.com. For some reason (simplifying their brand maybe?) they eventually got rid of that and now going to j.mp just gives you bit.ly URLs.
X.com was owned by PayPal/eBay for a while and originally hosted a site about X.commerce... their failed enterprise application bus (at least I think that's what it was).
They threw one heck of a party and then promptly disappeared.
x.com was indeed a weird business communication platform. They designed an entire API around SOAP-style verbs that had no RESTfullness whatsoever and were defined in a bunch of public read only repos.
for some reason it didn't catch on.
What's the consensus on paying a lot for .com these days?
It's seems like it's just not as important as it was before Google did their thing?
Just curious as to what HN has to say?
In the back on my mind, I keep hearing founder of HN, saying, 'a .com shows confidence in your business.', or something like that. Sam Altman. Today, I'm lazy.
My preference is a .com, but I'm a nobody.
If I had a portfolio of .com domans, I would sell now, or a few years ago.
At one time I had the idea of buying rich guys legal names, and wait for that email. The ones that actually give back, and are truely altruistic would get it at cost.
Unused single-letter gTLD domains are still being offered, it would appear; although there is both an unspecified financial bar and some kind of .ORG values-alignment test: http://www.project94.org/
The values test is presumably not too onerous, if Facebook could pass it to acquire i.org (apparently unused).
huh .. weird. Although that link is just for org. Does ICANN still offer com/net single letter TLDs?
I really hope we don't see http://a/ in the future. I'm not all that happy about the brand name TLDs that got approved .. feels like a return to AOL keywords.
I worked at PayPal 2003-2007. At some point my team had a meeting with the CEO of some vendor, and at the end, the guy pulled me aside and asked, "Do you know what happened to x.com? I used to work at PayPal, and when PayPal was acquired by eBay, part of the contract said that we could keep our x.com email addresses forever and that they would guarantee delivery would keep working as long as eBay still owned the domain. But it stopped working a little while ago".
So it turned out that eBay was contractually obligated to keep running x.com and the email addresses, but no one in ops knew that, thought it was unused, and shut it off.
I'm not sure if they ever got it working again, but I would guess that Elon didn't pay much for it, since eBay wasn't using it and technically was obligated to keep running it for Elon.
He may have just said, "Hey, I'll run it myself if you don't want it anymore."
67 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread(Thanks for down-votes in advance.)
The domain name x.com: It's interesting that something happened X.com as most of the other 26 single character domain names are reserved and won't be sold.
The history of it; Paypal, the previous owner of X.com and started by Elon Musk is a well known internet commerce success story; many readers not only have Paypal accounts, but also complex opinions of their service, and may even have worked there at one point.
Tantalizingly, as Elon Musk "enthusiastically" now owns X.com and has done other cool stuff in his life, it's interesting to fantasize about what might sort of content, if anything, Elon Musk will put up at X.com.
Finally, this is an article on TechCruch, and we're suckers for anything they post.
None of that might be as interesting as, say, "taking control of all .io domains with a targeted registration", but that has about 10x the points (1068 to this post's 104), but each upvote adds 1 point and is then plugged into the mysterious frontpage algorithm.
Elon Musk buying X.com isn't going to keep me up at night going wild with possibility, but it's really a human interest story and we're not robots. He owned this back in 1999; where where you then, where are you, and where do you think will you be, 18 years from now?
Is IANA sitting on them?
edit: Oh, from the wiki [1]: "In 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved all single-letter and single-digit second-level domain names in the top-level domains com, net, and org, and grandfathered those that had already been assigned."
"...with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the Alphabet."
Oops.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
Authorities taking steps against undue corporate control of the internet. It's almost quaint today.
Funny that z.com redirects to trade.z.com - it's like, someone realised that actually, a single letter is too short to build a brand.
If we weren't excited by silly things like single letter domain names, x.com could be owned by whoever makes the 'xcom' game, and it would just be a mildly 'good' or amusing domain name, like when .io, .sh, .ly, etc. work out particularly well.
Buying a single-letter domain is impressive, to say the least.
But a whole TechCrunch article, headlining with your face and name, because you tweeted about a domain name purchase for sentimental value is really next level. How did he manage to build such an impressive cognitive footprint in a world that's constantly fighting for your attention and ad revenue?
(... but then again, in the world of domain name purchases, I'm sure we'd all share a laugh if Sean Parker and / or Justin Timberlake bought "thefacebook.com" from Facebook.)
(Yes, I know Clinton used 2010. Her admin was a dumbass though).
It would also be nice if there was an enterprise alternative to Exchange that isn't Google Apps, but hey, dreams.
You know of those four (and can't think of anyone else!) because Elon Musk sold his vision to investors, employees, and the public through impressive salesmanship and an obscene amount of both grit and persistence. He aggregated resources and did what you do when you accumulate wealth for business purposes; he spent it to forward his goals. Some of which went towards impressive PR stunts and people wrangling.
Musk gets such great PR because the stuff he's done is actually an order of magnitude more impressing than others who have done "similar" things.
It's pretty analogous to people saying Steve Jobs had "amazing PR". It's easy to have amazing PR when you have amazing products, and so many of Apple's products (the Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) really were game changers in terms of functionality and usability.
The thing is; the entire point of his PR, no matter who helps perpetuate it, is built to craft the very opinion you have: Elon is amazing, and he can do it all on his own. While that's probably true to a large extent, it's not the only "truth" and reality. I, personally, am interested in the stories of the people who have helped him along the way - however few or many there may be.
Paypal was not even built by Elon Musk...By the way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity
Again, it's similar to the argument some people make that the iPod was just another MP3 player, or the iPhone was just another phone.
Of course, being awesome enough to have Robert Downey Jr. model his portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man after you accounts for most of it.
“But Robert Downey, when we were prepping ‘Iron Man,’ said, ‘There’s somebody we should sit down and talk with.’”
“[He] said, ‘This is a guy who can give us some insight into what it’d really be like to be Tony Stark.’”[0]
[0] https://www.recode.net/2016/10/12/13259344/elon-musk-iron-ma...
He feels like the individual equivalent to Google in the 00s and early parts of this decade when they were close to being infallible in the eyes of the general public and especially to the tech community.
Impressive job by the both of them!
I also think Elon Musk is reminiscent of the early railway pioneers - Brunel and Stephenson's son spring to mind.
Doesn't seem to be too expensive for someone with $15 Bn net worth. Nice of Paypal to let go of it though, I guess.
A little over 20% of Tesla is around $11B. A little over 50% of SpaceX is $7B to $8B (SpaceX hasn't been given a valuation for almost two years now). That's already close to $20B.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/11/prweb12345380.htm
I also recall pitching to various folks to use the domain as a URL shortener, but people rolled their eyes. Always felt like a missed opportunity to me, although I admit it was a kind of gimmicky idea.
They threw one heck of a party and then promptly disappeared.
some random evidence of its legacy: https://github.com/johnj/php5-xcom
It's seems like it's just not as important as it was before Google did their thing?
Just curious as to what HN has to say?
In the back on my mind, I keep hearing founder of HN, saying, 'a .com shows confidence in your business.', or something like that. Sam Altman. Today, I'm lazy.
My preference is a .com, but I'm a nobody.
If I had a portfolio of .com domans, I would sell now, or a few years ago.
At one time I had the idea of buying rich guys legal names, and wait for that email. The ones that actually give back, and are truely altruistic would get it at cost.
The values test is presumably not too onerous, if Facebook could pass it to acquire i.org (apparently unused).
I really hope we don't see http://a/ in the future. I'm not all that happy about the brand name TLDs that got approved .. feels like a return to AOL keywords.
I noticed Google uses just "go/XXXX" internally as an URL (no dots!).
So their internal DNS server must respond to just "go", or maybe there's a default search domain configured for everyone.
I worked at PayPal 2003-2007. At some point my team had a meeting with the CEO of some vendor, and at the end, the guy pulled me aside and asked, "Do you know what happened to x.com? I used to work at PayPal, and when PayPal was acquired by eBay, part of the contract said that we could keep our x.com email addresses forever and that they would guarantee delivery would keep working as long as eBay still owned the domain. But it stopped working a little while ago".
So it turned out that eBay was contractually obligated to keep running x.com and the email addresses, but no one in ops knew that, thought it was unused, and shut it off.
I'm not sure if they ever got it working again, but I would guess that Elon didn't pay much for it, since eBay wasn't using it and technically was obligated to keep running it for Elon.
He may have just said, "Hey, I'll run it myself if you don't want it anymore."