When was X.com founded?
X.com was an online bank founded in the year of 1999 in Palo Alto, California, USA, and was founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho, to know the history of X.com just browse this article. It served as the first online banking site. But in October 2001, Elon Musk chose to close down its operations. In 2000, X.com combined with a contender Confinity Inc., a software-based company located in Palo Alto. Due to its easy payment method, Elon decided, and later the merged company was named PayPal. Later in 2002, the multinational e-commerce company eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, and after 13 years, eBay spun off PayPal and chose to make an independent firm. Are you curious about when was X.com founded, here is the information about X.com and its history for you.
The below information is about the history and the answer for when was X.com founded, go ahead to get detail information about it.
X.com’s business plan and history
Business plan
FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and a multinational investment bank and financial service company named Barclays ensured that the deposits were insured. Including Elon Musk (the current 2nd richest man in the world), Greg Kouri was the initial fundraiser for this domain. Later, he funded other Musk ventures: his startup SpaceX and Tesla.
Customers or users were drawn in by the fact that a new member received a $20 cash card and, for new member referrals, a $10 cash card, and the customers were not reckoned with an overdraft penalty or fees. The money transfer process on x.com was simple; they only needed to input their email address to transfer any amount to them. Further, a consumer can open an account in the domain without any email verification.
While giving an interview with CBS Market watch, Elon Musk stated that people are ready to use the Internet as their financial repository. So, he began his planning by selling Zip2 Crop to Compaq, and in March 1999, Elon musk financed $12 million with the help of Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho.
History
On December 7, 1999, the founder of Zip2 Crop, 28-year-old Elon Musk, and the other co-founders formed X.com. Musk sacked Fricker five months after launching x.com owing to disagreements about how to operate a business, and the other co-founders, Payne and Ho, followed suit.
Elon Musk visualized this domain as full-scale banking and investment service that offered everything from mortgages, bonds, lending, and checking accounts and investment services. He distributed the roles of CEO and president to the ex-CEO of Intuit Corp, Bill Harris, and executive vice president to an investment banker John Story, while he took the role of chairman. There in total 15 staff members working at that time. Sanchez Computers Associates’ e-PROFILE Internet bank solution provided the site operation. The venture capital of approximately $25 million came from Harris, Musk, and Sequoia Capital.
The company intended to make money by relying on the interest rate margins between what it made on loans and what it paid on accounts. It attracted 200,000 signups and secured 100,000 customers through this plan in two months, whereas Etrade Telebank, the largest World Wide Web-based bank, had 130,000 customers. But as per a columnist of Forbes, Elizabeth Corcoran, cash incentives were insufficient to allay consumer anxieties about virtual banking, especially after X.com was forced to concede that its first site design had allowed for fraud. In January, the firm acknowledged its system was far too easy to empty money from traditional bank accounts into an X.com account. X.com identified some suspected transfers and returned the funds.
Within 3-4 months of taking the operation of X.com, it merged with PayPal without changing its name. During that time, PayPal fetched around 15k new customers a day with its new P2P (Person to Person) payment method services. The new registration process was simple; the user was required to input their name, phone number (daytime), home address, and email address. After the new registration process came, PayPal users received an automated email from another PayPal account holder with the title, “You’ve Got Cash!”
Later in June 2000, X.com extended PayPal services by adding payment between B2C (Business to Consumer), including those payments via cell phones. Clients could pay their bills on the X.com website or by pressing the “x” letter on their cell phones and entering the payee’s email address, but only for those who had put funds into their X.com account via credit card, electronic fund transfer, or check. Compared to the typical 2.9 percent monthly fee charges levied by credit card firms PayPal assessed no monthly fee. Pay-Pal instead billed 1.9 percent for each completed transaction, compared to the industry standard of 30 cents per credit card transaction.
In just six months after joining the new firm, Harris has to leave due to Management differences. While, Musk went on a honeymoon trip to Australia on September 2000, and the X.com management board voted for Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Confinity, and removed Musk from the position of CEO of the firm. After naming Peter Theil as the new CEO of X.com, the company was renamed PayPal less than a year later, in June 2001.
What is Elon Musk’s enigmatic goal for X.com?
Elon Musk repurchased X.com on July 5, 2017, sixteen years after standing down as CEO of X.com. He later stated that the X.com had sentimental meaning, so he purchased it. A PayPal representative in conversation with DomainInvesting confirmed that Elon Musk bought it and said, “We are thrilled to be returning x.com to its prior owner, Elon Musk.”
On July 14, 2017, X.com again started the domain with a blank white page with one “x” in the upper left corner and a bespoke error page displaying a “y”. Because the site’s source code contains nothing except the letter “x,”.
X.com routed visitors to The Boring Company’s website in December 2017, which Musk also controls.
Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as “an accelerant to producing X, the everything app” on October 4, 2022.
In a conversation with Ron Baron, Musk said to execute the X product plan “with some tweaks”, which’ll create Twitter as “the most valuable financial institution in the world.”
FAQs
- Where did Musk get the money for X.com?
In 1995, Elon Musk and his younger brother started a company in Palo Alto, California, and sold that to Compaq for approximately $300 million. Musk used the funds from the deal to launch X.com.