Author:Niu SikeDeep Tide TechFlow
Some dreams don't die; they're just waiting for the right moment.
A preterm infant from 1999
In March 1999, in Palo Alto, 27-year-old Elon Musk made a decision that seemed almost absurd at the time.
He put all the $22 million he earned from selling Zip2 into a website called X.com.
At that time, Silicon Valley was still the era of Yahoo and AOL, and the Internet in people's eyes was equivalent to portals. Proposing the concept of "online banking" at that time was like promoting rockets in the horse-drawn carriage era. However, Musk's ideal X.com was not just an online bank. What he wanted to create was an online financial operating system: a single platform where all financial services could be realized, including money transfers, investments, loans, insurance, and even daily spending.
Silicon Valley at the time thought this young man from South Africa was crazy.
That was the era of dial-up internet, accompanied by the screeching sounds of modems, and loading a single webpage could sometimes take half a minute. Asking users to transfer money over a 28.8K snail-paced network? That sounded like a joke.
Ambition can be terrifying, but reality strikes back even harder.
One year later, X.com merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity (the predecessor to PayPal). What was supposed to be a "union of geniuses" eventually turned into a Silicon Valley version of Game of Thrones. Thiel's group of Stanford-educated elites couldn't stand Musk's chaotic and aggressive style, considering this engineer-turned-CEO a dangerously reckless man.
In September 2000, disaster struck. Musk was flying to Australia for his honeymoon. Just as the flight landed in Sydney, and before he had even stepped out of the airport, a call from the board arrived: "You're out."
Peter Thiel took control of everything. A few months later, the "X.com" sign that Musk had favored was removed, and the company was renamed PayPal.
The foundation of the "financial empire" that Musk spent an entire year building was leveled by a group of investment bankers wearing Brioni custom suits, leaving behind only the simplest function: payment.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal, and Musk received $180 million. Financially, he had won, but at that moment, he looked like a child who had just had his favorite toy taken away. A fishbone had pierced deep into his heart.
In the following two decades, he created the best electric cars, sent rockets into space, and vowed to die on Mars. Yet whenever someone mentioned PayPal, he couldn't hide his sense of loss.
X.com has always been his nemesis.
Bring the "washstand" into Wall Street
On October 27, 2022, Musk walked into the Twitter headquarters building, holding a bathroom basin.
This detail was later wildly reported by the media, but the real message was the sentence he wrote on Twitter: "Let that sink in."
A pun. Let the washbasin in, and let all of this settle down as well.
The outside world thinks he bought Twitter for free speech, or to defend Trump. They're all wrong. What Musk wants is revenge—for the betrayal 25 years ago.
The first step is to change the name.
X. A single letter, carrying all his anger and ambition. Those who once mocked X.com as too ahead of its time would now witness its rebirth on this platform.
But Musk is smart. He knows he can't do it all at once; turning Twitter directly into a bank would scare users away. So he chose a gradual approach.
At the beginning of 2023, X was still primarily a lightweight social platform with a 140-character limit. Musk first adjusted the content strategy, encouraging more original content and real-time discussions. Then came paid subscriptions, training users to spend money on the platform.
By mid-year, the long tweet feature was launched. Users could now post longer and more in-depth content, and the platform began to transition from a short-message hub to an information center.
Next is a significant enhancement of video features. Musk wants to make X a one-stop platform for information consumption, so users no longer need to switch to YouTube or other video websites.
At the end of 2023, the creator revenue-sharing program was officially launched. The platform began to develop an economic ecosystem, allowing users to earn income through content creation. This was a crucial step, as Musk is cultivating users' transaction habits.
Then comes the big move in 2024.
Financial license applications, payment system development... Musk is no longer being coy. He wants to turn X into a financial platform.
In January 2026, X product lead Nikita Bier stated that the platform was developing a Smart Cashtags feature, which would allow users to precisely reference specific assets or smart contracts when posting ticker symbols.
Users can embed tags like $TSLA in tweets to display stock prices in real time. It seems like just an information display feature, but it's actually the final piece of the financialization puzzle.
Imagine this: you see a news post on X about NVIDIA's new chip, the stock price immediately jumps 5%, and then you directly click on the $NVDA tag to place a buy order.
Social, information, and transactions—combined into one, this is the vision that Musk aimed to realize at X.com back in the day.
From city squares to information centers, and then to trading halls. It took Musk two years to gradually guide users to accept X's transformation.
To alleviate users' concerns, Musk made an unprecedented decision: to open source all the algorithms.
On January 10, 2026, Musk announced on X that he would officially open source the latest content recommendation algorithm for the X platform within a week, covering the code for both organic and advertised content recommendations. Subsequent updates will be released every four weeks, accompanied by developer documentation.
The recommendation algorithms of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are black boxes; no one knows why certain content is shown to users. When it comes to financial services, this lack of transparency becomes a critical flaw.
Musk has broken the black box with open source. Users can inspect the code, developers can audit security, and regulators can supervise compliance.
All of this is merely paving the way for financialization.
Late validation
X.com in 1999 died due to being "ahead of its time." Back then, the internet was still in the dial-up era, with broadband penetration under 10%. Online payments required more than ten security verifications, and users were full of fear about putting their money online.
More importantly, the regulatory environment was extremely strict. Banking regulators viewed internet finance as a dangerous threat, and the government was also proceeding cautiously, feeling its way forward. Musk's aggressive strategies seemed too risky in that conservative era.
But history has proven that his judgment was correct.
But the validation came too late, and from an unexpected place: China.
In 2011, WeChat was launched. Initially just a chat application, it quickly evolved into a super app, much like the one Musk had envisioned. It can now do everything—chatting, payments, ride-hailing, food ordering, wealth management, and more. Alipay has also developed from a simple third-party payment tool into a comprehensive financial platform.
Musk saw this with his eyes and grew anxious in his heart.
In June 2022, he openly stated during his first all-hands meeting with Twitter employees: "In China, people basically live on WeChat because it's very practical and helpful for daily life. I believe that if we could reach this level on Twitter, or even just come close to it, it would be a tremendous success."
This statement sounds like a compliment to WeChat, but also expresses regret over his failure 25 years ago. Chinese people achieved in ten years what he had wanted to accomplish back in 1999.
Now it's his turn.
Mobile payments have already rewritten global consumer habits. Cryptocurrencies have evolved from geek toys into investment assets for pension funds. Blockchain technology has made decentralized finance a reality, and regulators are beginning to embrace innovation.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved a Bitcoin ETF, the European Union has launched the Digital Euro Project, and the People's Bank of China is piloting the Digital Yuan.
Musk has been waiting for 25 years, and this is the moment he's been waiting for.
With this underlying context, when you look at Smart Cashtags, you'll understand that Musk's real opponent has never been Zuckerberg.
Meta controls social relationships, Google controls information indexing, and Apple controls hardware access. However, to this day, no single tech giant has truly controlled the global "flow of funds."
This is the ultimate goal of X. Finance is the underlying protocol of the business world. Whoever controls the flow of capital holds the throat of the digital economy. This is more impactful than building a search engine or selling smartphones.
Musk is redefining an ultra-fast chain from "information" to "decision" and then to "action." Imagine this: Musk tweets about a new Tesla technology. Within seconds, 100,000 people click on the $TSLA hashtag. Algorithms analyze sentiment to predict market movements, automatically pushing trading recommendations to users, who then place orders with a single click. Influence is instantly transformed into trading volume.
This is the financialization of social interaction. The traditional Wall Street model—analysts writing research reports, brokers making phone calls—will seem clumsy and expensive in the face of algorithms.
Going back to the original question, why did Musk want to acquire Twitter?
The answer has already been made public. On October 5, 2022, Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter accelerated the development of the super app "X."
Only now do people truly understand this saying.
Dreaming back to 1999, the ghost of X.com has finally found the moment to rise again. This time, no one can stop him. He is no longer the 27-year-old entrepreneur who had to rely on others, but the world's richest man with absolute authority.
Welcome to the X Universe
If we zoom out and step beyond the ups and downs of Wall Street and the rivalries in Silicon Valley, you'll discover a far more chilling pattern.
Elon Musk's obsession with the letter "X" has long transcended the realm of commercial branding, evolving into an almost pathological totemic worship.
Look at what he has done over the past two decades: when he tried to send humans to Mars, he named his company SpaceX; when he wanted to create a flagship SUV that would define Tesla's future, he insisted on calling it the Model X despite resistance; and when he left OpenAI to develop his own large AI model, he named it xAI.
He even named his most beloved son X Æ A-12, and in daily life, he only calls him "Little X."
In mathematics, X represents an unknown variable, symbolizing infinite possibilities. But in Musk's life story, X is the one constant.
25 years ago, the young man who was kicked out of the PayPal board lost his X. 25 years later, the richest person who owns rockets, cars, AI, and the world's largest public opinion arena, finally picked this piece of the puzzle back up.
Everything is for the sake of making X happen.
Welcome to Musk's X universe.