X.COM and X.AI: The Golden Age of X and Elon Musk
It is an obvious fact that Elon Musk is leaving his mark on the age we live in. He is keen on technology and likes remaining on the agenda with his activities and initiatives. He is founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc. and owner of Twitter.
To choose the right domain name for his companies has always been a delicate subject for Elon Musk. One of his companies Tesla was using TeslaMotors.com domain name before it was upgraded to Tesla.com. In a podcast, Musk explained that it took 10 years to buy Tesla.com domain name. In 2018 he also said on Twitter that acquaring Tesla.com domain name actually cost $11 million, and took an amazing amount of effort.
In April this year The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk created an artificial intelligence company called X.AI. When you visit the website of the company x.ai, you see an announcement dated July 12th 2023. It says “Today we announce the formation of xAI.The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. We will share more information over the next couple of weeks and months.”
xAI is the company name, and x.ai is the domain name of the company. It is the point that brings the importance of domain names into sharp relief and this situation must be discussed to forecast the future of branding and domaining. Here, the domain name is chosen as the company name by the richest man in the world. For their advertisement campaigns, it is a big chance for not only .ai domain extension but also for other new gTLDs.
It has been tried to explain why domain names must match with their exact company names for a few decades by domainers. And now xAI case shows us that the significance of domain names are much bigger than this. A domain name together with its extension matches a company name. Of course, it is not the first, there are lots of companies that choose this kind of branding. But the important point is that this selection is made by a famous businessman.
A few days ago, it was also discovered that ai.com was forwarded to x.ai. Now when you visit ai.com, you reach x.ai. On Twitter, the domainers discussed if Elon Musk acquired ai.com. We will probably learn about the details of this domain acquisition in the near future.
While mentioning Twitter, we must certainly talk about X.com owned by Elon Musk. Last month Elon Musk tweeted stating that Twitter is rebranded as X and a new interim logo will be used. There have been lots of debates on it and I think it is not suitable to rebrand a very powerful brand name such as “Twitter”. Establishing a brand and increasing its recognition level takes too much time and Twitter is one of the most known brands in the world. X.com is a very valuable brand name and can easily be used as a master brand including all the companies owned by Musk. But he decided to rebrand it.
What more do you want me to say? He is the boss and walking on his way.
