With a tweet, Elon Musk just confirmed that he is the proud new owner of X.com, an admittedly very cool domain that he owned all the way back in 1999.
Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back https://t.co/bOUOejO16Y! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 11, 2017
The Whois change seems to have first been spotted by blogger Elliot Silver, who noted that X.com had been collecting dust since its days as a PayPal predecessor. On July 3rd, the domain changed hands to a private new owner and now we have confirmation that it is a very enthusiastic (and apparently nostalgic) Elon.
Musk previously owned X.com when it served as a home for his financial services startup that was eventually rolled up with another company called Confinity in a deal that would be rebranded as PayPal in 2001.
Single letter domains are valuable and x is obviously the coolest, most versatile letter in the alphabet so it wouldn’t be surprising if the sale was priced well above $5 million. That kind of price tag would put it well within the most expensive domain names hall of fame, though we’ll likely have to wait for a future filing to reveal the specifics.
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We’ll also have to wait to see what Musk has in store for X.com, a fitting web home that dovetails nicely with both Musk’s SpaceX and his Tesla Model X branding.
Until then, congrats to the proud new owner of the most mysterious domain name of all — one truly befitting a man of his mysteriousness.