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Nikhil Kamath interviews Elon Musk
At Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s ‘WTF is’ podcast, the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, opened up about several key topics regarding his ventures and India, during the candid, black-and-white interview.
The CEO of Tesla, X, SpaceX and Neuralink, revealed his long-running, curious obsession with the letter ‘X,’ admitting that even he sometimes questions it.
Elon Musk explains his affinity with the letter ‘X'
The viral clip from the podcast confirms Musk’s deep inclination for the letter that has branded nearly his entire professional life, from his original company, X.com (the precursor to PayPal), to the name of his aerospace venture, SpaceX, his artificial intelligence firm, xAI, and the massive rebranding of popular Twitter to X.
Musk even named one of his children X Æ A-12 (known as X). Also, the Tesla Model X electric SUV has the alphabet X.
Kamath asked, “Why do you like the letter X as much as you do?”
Musk simply laughed and confessed, “It’s a good question. Honestly, sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me.”
“It started way back in ancient times in ’99, the Precambrian era, when there were only sponges,” he added. “There were only three one-letter domain names: X, Q, and Z (available). And I was like, okay, I want to create this place where it’s the financial crossroads or the financial exchange.”
Musk’s vision with X.com in 1999 was to make money from an information theory standpoint. “The current banking system is a large number of heterogeneous databases with batch processing that are not secure.”
He further said, “If we could have a single database that was real-time and secure, that would be more efficient from a monetary, from an information theory standpoint than a large number of heterogeneous databases that batch process very slowly and insecurely.”
Musk’s opportunity to use X again came with his acquisition of Twitter.
“When I was acquiring Twitter, I was like, well, maybe this would also be an opportunity to revisit the original plan of X.com, which is to create this clearing house of financial transactions," he said. "Basically, to create a more efficient database — a money database is a way to think about it.”