
Elon Musk confirms that he just bought back X.com, the domain he owned in 1999 - janober
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/10/elon-musk-x-dot-com
======
keithwhor
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.)

~~~
amenghra
thefacebook.com is/was the web mail portal:
[https://mail.thefacebook.com/](https://mail.thefacebook.com/)

~~~
smachiz
Are they really running Exchange 2010?

~~~
kchoudhu
Wouldn't be surprising. As it turns out, lots of businesses run on Microsoft
technologies.

~~~
hrrsn
I think the poster was questioning why they weren't running a more recent
version of Exchange such as 2013/2016

~~~
kchoudhu
My company uses 2010 as well. It's regularly patched and supported for another
two or three years. Why fix what's not broken?

(Yes, I know Clinton used 2010. Her admin was a dumbass though).

------
jedberg
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."

------
kethinov
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
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
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.

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

~~~
nomel
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_dom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _"...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
It was still Postel's IANA. I'm sure current ICANN would be a very different
organization if he was still at the helm.

------
inopinatus
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
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
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
I have seen internal toplevel domains before, it's much less impressive.
Imagine a company making "[https://mail/"](https://mail/") load their webmail,
etc...

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

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

------
nvahalik
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
Ah, yes, back in the frothy days when your Series A money was spent
exclusively on the launch party.

~~~
elialbert
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)

------
shardo
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
The writer is just hypothesizing.

~~~
djsumdog
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?

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

~~~
gallerdude
It's a bit interesting, no? Hacker News isn't literally news, it's what people
of our type find interesting.

~~~
babyrainbow
Ok..What is interesting about this?

~~~
fragmede
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
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.

