To understand the weight of the rebranding, one must look back to the late 1990s. was originally founded by Elon Musk in 1999 as an online bank. It was a bold venture into the fledgling world of fintech, eventually merging with a competitor named Confinity. The merged company adopted the name of Confinity’s primary project: PayPal. While PayPal went on to become a giant in online payments, the domain X.com lay dormant in the archives of corporate history.