8 ms·

Elon Musk confirms that he just bought back X.com, the domain he owned in 1999

131 points by janober 9y ago

WaxProlix 9y ago
I feel like I'm missing something, maybe - how is this news?
- gallerdude 9y ago
  It's a bit interesting, no? Hacker News isn't literally news, it's what people of our type find interesting.
  - jv22222 9y ago
    I'm a type, yayy!! (Thanks for down-votes in advance.)
  - babyrainbow 9y ago
    Ok..What is interesting about this?
    - fragmede 9y ago
      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?
      - babyrainbow 9y ago
        A person can be interesting. I agree. But I don't agree that any mundane actions that this interesting person do is also automatically interesting.
Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
Just checked, and of all the single-letter domains, only u.com and z.com are being used.
- gboudrias 9y ago
  Seems like a huge waste, huh?
- nomel 9y ago
  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." Oops. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    > "...with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the Alphabet." Authorities taking steps against undue corporate control of the internet. It's almost quaint today.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      It was still Postel's IANA. I'm sure current ICANN would be a very different organization if he was still at the helm.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Yep, was going to mention that but it seems you found it. Musk got his x domain grandfathered in.
- OJFord 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zitterbewegung 9y ago
It would be a good domain for a holding company or even just a summary of the companies he does.
keithwhor 9y ago
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.)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- amenghra 9y ago
  thefacebook.com is/was the web mail portal: https://mail.thefacebook.com/ https://mail.thefacebook.com/
  - smachiz 9y ago
    Are they really running Exchange 2010?
    - kchoudhu 9y ago
      Wouldn't be surprising. As it turns out, lots of businesses run on Microsoft technologies.
      - hrrsn 9y ago
        I think the poster was questioning why they weren't running a more recent version of Exchange such as 2013/2016
        9y ago
shardo 9y ago
For $5 million? 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.
- tcdent 9y ago
  The writer is just hypothesizing.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    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?
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  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.
- lzy 9y ago
  For comparison, Z.com sold for nearly $6.8 million in 2014. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/11/prweb12345380.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/11/prweb12345380.htm
kethinov 9y ago
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.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  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.
  - Nition 9y ago
    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.
- abhi3 9y ago
  Not much demand for URL shorteners pre-twitter.
nvahalik 9y ago
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.
- astrodust 9y ago
  Ah, yes, back in the frothy days when your Series A money was spent exclusively on the launch party.
  - elialbert 9y ago
    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. some random evidence of its legacy: https://github.com/johnj/php5-xcom https://github.com/johnj/php5-xcom
icantdrive55 9y ago
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.
inopinatus 9y ago
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/ http://www.project94.org/ The values test is presumably not too onerous, if Facebook could pass it to acquire i.org (apparently unused).
- djsumdog 9y ago
  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/ 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.
  - Erwin 9y ago
    The Danish hostmaster as http://dk http://dk configured with an A record. 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.
    - andrewjw 9y ago
      I have seen internal toplevel domains before, it's much less impressive. Imagine a company making "https://mail/" https://mail/" load their webmail, etc...
senthilnayagam 9y ago
I have a X dot com t-shirt which was given at a Paypal event couple of years ago
jedberg 9y ago
Oooo time for my x.com story!! 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."

131 points by janober 9y ago

WaxProlix 9y ago

I feel like I'm missing something, maybe - how is this news?

gallerdude 9y ago
It's a bit interesting, no? Hacker News isn't literally news, it's what people of our type find interesting.
- jv22222 9y ago
  I'm a type, yayy!! (Thanks for down-votes in advance.)
- babyrainbow 9y ago
  Ok..What is interesting about this?
  - fragmede 9y ago
    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?
    - babyrainbow 9y ago
      A person can be interesting. I agree. But I don't agree that any mundane actions that this interesting person do is also automatically interesting.

Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago

Just checked, and of all the single-letter domains, only u.com and z.com are being used.

gboudrias 9y ago
Seems like a huge waste, huh?
nomel 9y ago
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." Oops. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  > "...with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the Alphabet." Authorities taking steps against undue corporate control of the internet. It's almost quaint today.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    It was still Postel's IANA. I'm sure current ICANN would be a very different organization if he was still at the helm.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Yep, was going to mention that but it seems you found it. Musk got his x domain grandfathered in.
OJFord 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

zitterbewegung 9y ago

It would be a good domain for a holding company or even just a summary of the companies he does.

keithwhor 9y ago

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.)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
amenghra 9y ago
thefacebook.com is/was the web mail portal: https://mail.thefacebook.com/ https://mail.thefacebook.com/
- smachiz 9y ago
  Are they really running Exchange 2010?
  - kchoudhu 9y ago
    Wouldn't be surprising. As it turns out, lots of businesses run on Microsoft technologies.
    - hrrsn 9y ago
      I think the poster was questioning why they weren't running a more recent version of Exchange such as 2013/2016
      - 9y ago

shardo 9y ago

For $5 million? 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.

tcdent 9y ago
The writer is just hypothesizing.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  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?
skinnymuch 9y ago
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.
lzy 9y ago
For comparison, Z.com sold for nearly $6.8 million in 2014. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/11/prweb12345380.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/11/prweb12345380.htm

kethinov 9y ago

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.

skinnymuch 9y ago
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.
- Nition 9y ago
  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.
abhi3 9y ago
Not much demand for URL shorteners pre-twitter.

nvahalik 9y ago

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.

astrodust 9y ago
Ah, yes, back in the frothy days when your Series A money was spent exclusively on the launch party.
- elialbert 9y ago
  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. some random evidence of its legacy: https://github.com/johnj/php5-xcom https://github.com/johnj/php5-xcom

icantdrive55 9y ago

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.

inopinatus 9y ago

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/ http://www.project94.org/ The values test is presumably not too onerous, if Facebook could pass it to acquire i.org (apparently unused).

djsumdog 9y ago
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/ 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.
- Erwin 9y ago
  The Danish hostmaster as http://dk http://dk configured with an A record. 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.
  - andrewjw 9y ago
    I have seen internal toplevel domains before, it's much less impressive. Imagine a company making "https://mail/" https://mail/" load their webmail, etc...

senthilnayagam 9y ago

I have a X dot com t-shirt which was given at a Paypal event couple of years ago

jedberg 9y ago

Oooo time for my x.com story!! 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."