Elon Musk co-founded X.com in 1999 as an online financial-services company.
Musk founded X.com with Harris Fricker, Ed Ho, and Christopher Payne in March 1999. The company aimed to provide banking and payment services over the internet, including email-based money transfers. Its early banking model was unusual because it offered customers online financial tools before internet banking was widely established.
X.com later merged with Confinity, the company behind PayPal, in 2000. The combined business eventually adopted the PayPal name, and eBay acquired PayPal in 2002. A common mix-up is to call X.com itself the original name of PayPal; more precisely, X.com was one of the companies that combined to form the PayPal business. Musk later acquired the X.com domain again and renamed Twitter X in 2023.