Guess What Single Letter Is on Elon Musk's New Mystery Site

We'll give you a hint: The site is X.com
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 14, 2017 2:45 PM CDT
Elon Musk Messes With Our Minds With New Website
In this Dec. 14, 2016, file photo, Tesla CEO Elon Musk listens as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York.   (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

With his fascination of all things AI and outer space, Elon Musk is used to trafficking in the mysterious, much like someone obsessed with the X-Files would do. And, in fact, the name of his cryptic new website sounds strikingly similar to the cult TV show: X.com, which Gizmodo reports he launched under cover of darkness early Friday morning. "It's a little verbose right now, but that will be fixed tomorrow," the Space X and Tesla CEO joked (we think) in a tweet, referring to the fact that the website currently hosts just one piece of content on it—a tiny letter "x" in the upper left-hand corner on the home page. Musk apparently used to own the domain when he was a co-chief at PayPal, but he lost it when he left the company. "We are delighted to sell the domain x.com back to its previous owner, Elon Musk," a PayPal rep said last week after the sale, per Business Insider.

A domain management expert tells Quartz the domain, which Musk said had "sentimental value" in a tweet last week, may have been rescooped up by him for eight figures (so maybe $10 million or so). Gizmodo unpacks the history of single-letter domain names, the sale of which were nixed in 1993; there are just six that were grandfathered in, with q.com and z.com being the only other .com ones. Meanwhile, everyone remains puzzled by Musk's new baby, with Mashable even digging into the source code to see if it could find any clues—but instead of "hidden wizardry," all that was uncovered was "good old classic HTML" setting up that small letter on the screen. Everyone's having a bit of fun imagining what will appear next on the site, with suggestions ranging from a capital "X" to a showcase for Tesla's Model X SUV to Gizmodo's theory that Musk could "build the website one letter at a time." (More Elon Musk stories.)

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