Elon Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino held a virtual all-hands meeting for X recently to mark the one-year anniversary of Musk’s takeover.
Neither Musk nor Yaccarino, who have publically insisted on workers being back in the office, were actually in the San Fransisco headquarters, both joining remotely.
It has been a tumultuous year for the company, from name changes, to policy changes, to a host of lawsuits by government agencies, to the loss of nearly 50% of Twitter’s advertisers.
Musk and Yaccarino seem to be flailing for ways to salvage value out of Musk’s $44 billion investment.
Now it seems Musk is again taking a left turn with the company strategy to return to familiar ground… online banking.
For those scratching their heads at this decision, let us take a step back in time.
Back in 1999, fresh off a sale of Zip2 to Compaq, young Elon Musk started X.com, the first federally insured online bank.
Four months later in March of 2000, X.com was merged with payment processing company Cofinity, with Musk named as CEO of the combined company, initially called X.com.
Six months after that, while Musk was on his honeymoon, the X.com board of directors ousted Musk in favor of Cofinity’s former CEO Peter Thiel.
The company was renamed Paypal and when it went public a short time later it generated enough interest for eBay to buy it up for $1.5 billion.
Musk still owned over 11% of the stock and the deal made him very, very wealthy, but without having realized his goal of a completely digital banking and payment processing system.
He bought the X.com name and website back from Thiel and company, saving it for a rainy day which came to fruition in the last year in the ashes of what was once Twitter.
Now it seems, he is intent on remaking Twitter into the vision of a digital bank which was never fully recognized.
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