Elon Musk founded the online banking company X.com in 1999.
X.com began as an internet financial-services company offering online banking and payment features. In 2000, it merged with Confinity, a company whose products included an online money-transfer service.
After the merger, the combined business increasingly focused on the payment product that became PayPal. The company changed its name to PayPal in 2001, so X.com is the correct answer for Musk’s original online banking venture rather than the later brand.
Musk returned to the X.com name decades later when he acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded the platform as X. That later use is historically connected to, but legally and operationally distinct from, the original financial company.