Domain operations are performed every day. Dear, so-called premium domains cost thousands and even millions of US dollars (in
some cases - tens of millions). However, the purchase and sale of domains usually does not cause much excitement in the media and ordinary people who are far from the domain business. But yesterday, many Western media outlets wrote about one such transaction. Thanks to them, it became
known that entrepreneur Ilon Musk, who owns several companies and managing even more of them, bought the domain x.com from PayPal.
The cost of the transaction, according to rumors, was about $ 5 million. Musk himself was very pleased with his purchase, although he said that he had no clear plans for using this domain. But, by his own admission, there is a special nostalgic feeling.
The thing is that this domain belonged to the Mask before. In 1999, he
founded the company X.com, which was one of the first online banks in the world. It was the second startup for Mask (the first was Zip2, he sold it to Compaq in the same 1999). X.com as a company gave Mask a lot.
After working for a year, she merged with Cofinity, the company that owned the money transfer service. This service was called PayPal. Musk worked for several months as CEO of the united organization, but left his post due to disagreements with other leaders. After leaving the position of CEO, he still remained on the board of directors.
Initially, the combined business was named X.com, but then, after a detailed analysis of customer preferences, changed the name to PayPal, it happened in 2001. Well, in 2002, PayPal was bought by Ebay Inc. for $ 1.5 billion. This deal brought Mask $ 165 million, as he owned 11.7% of the company sold.
As mentioned above, Mask does not yet know what he will do with his new (old) domain. Perhaps it will be used as the domain of the SpaceX site or a resource dedicated to Tesla Model X.