Max Chafkin wrote:

Others have pointed this out, but this renaming is stepping on the exact same rake that got him ousted by PayPal. Wrote about this in my book.

With Thiel gone, all this fell on Musk, who focused instead on expanding PayPal's ambitions. Since Musk had always seen X as much more than just a payments company, he asked the marketing department to rework the PayPal logo to include X -- renaming the service X-PayPal and beginning to phase out the PayPal name altogether.

To the group Thiel had hired, this was insanity. Sellers on eBay were already routinely saying things like "PayPal me the money," using the company's name as a verb -- a linguist's nightmare, but a landmark achievement for any startup. Meanwhile, X had conducted a series of focus groups showing that customers disliked the brand name, because it reminded them of porn. Musk was unmoved, possibly, employees gossiped, because of sunk costs. He'd paid at least $1 million to acquire the X.com domain name, legend within the company had it. "Nothing would convince him," said Martin, the PayPal marketer.

The Guardian wrote:


X is how Musk referred to the son he had with the musician Grimes after the child’s original name – X Æ A-12 – was rejected for flouting a California law that limits birth certificates to “the 26 alphabetical letters of the English language”. Grimes said the X took inspiration from algebra’s “unknown variable”, while Æ (a diphthong that echoes the long I in most English dialects) referred to the “elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)”. Musk tacked on the A-12, the label for Lockheed’s mold-breaking spy plane (“the coolest plane ever,” he gushed to Joe Rogan).