— Fontendo (Inactive／活動永久凍結) (@Fontendou) July 24, 2023 It also comes at a time when Twitter is struggling financially. According to Musk, around half of Twitter’s advertisers have pulled out of the platform, and there’s still a “heavy debt load” on the company (around $13 billion, according to some reports). User engagement has also declined since January of this year, with traffic dropping around 5% each month. The history of X and Elon Musk Taylor Frint / Digital Trends The pressing reason Twitter is now called X may be the hubris of Elon Musk, but that hubris runs much deeper than a whim. In 1999, Elon Musk founded the original X.com. A year later, it merged with Confinity, which a year after that rebranded to PayPal. There’s a lot of history here with Elon Musk and X. Reportedly, Confinity (now known as PayPal) was significantly more popular than X was, which is why the merger originally took place. After it happened, Musk returned as CEO, shortly after PayPal’s cofounder Peter Thiel resigned. According to a report from Fortune in 2007, Musk stirred up a big controversy at PayPal. He wanted to transfer the company’s platform to Microsoft’s operating system and ditch the Unix-based system that PayPal was using. This reportedly led to a “holy war” within the company, leading to Musk being fired as CEO and ousted from the company. Years later, in 2017, Musk purchased X.com from PayPal for “millions.” At the time, Musk said it was because the name had “great sentimental value” to him. Fast forward another six years and Musk is now putting the domain to work by redirecting it to Twitter. X copyright controversy