Elon Musk’s Twitter Unveils a Newly Named Conference Room at HQ, Raising Some Eyebrows

The letter X carries the weight of history in its crosshairs. With origins in the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, it’s come to signify the most-known religious figure in history, displays of affection and illicit content, and, well, a whole lot of nothing.

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter and the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has been publicly enamored with the letter for half his life — a fascination that has only intensified in recent months. He’s named his new artificial intelligence venture xAI, and he has repeatedly proposed X as an “everything app” with Twitter at its core. But his rebranding of the company he bought for $44 billion is perhaps the most publicly unreal.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters — less than a day after the possibly Unicode-d logo was projected onto the building — the pivot to X is reportedly coming in hard and fast. The New York Times reported Monday that conference rooms in the downtown office have received new names such as “eXult,” “eXposure” and, uh, “s3Xy.” (More on the latter word in a bit.)

His push to dub everything in his grasp with the 24th letter of the alphabet feels like the ultimate culmination of his life’s work as a technologist, for better or worse. Back in 1999, before Musk’s affinities for electric cars and free speech absolutism were publicly known, Musk co-founded a dot-com banking company called X.com, which merged with another firm called Confinity. He apparently felt strongly enough about the X.com branding that he kept that name even as others wanted to rename the merged company something else: PayPal. (The victor of that war was clear, but he got a small win when he bought the domain name X.com from PayPal in 2017.)

Musk was eventually ousted from the company, but even as X.com became PayPal, the X stayed within his sights. In 2002, Musk founded the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — or SpaceX for short. The letter also factors into one of the core Tesla vehicles: The Model X, the company’s first SUV, was released in 2015.

Even in his personal life, X has resonated. Musk and Canadian musician Grimes named their first child X Æ A-12. The child had to be renamed due to California law prohibiting numbers in legal names, so another X was added: X Æ A-Xii. Grimes, at the time, explained that the X stood for “the unknown variable.”

But all speculation of profundity and ambition surrounding the X could be for naught. The current Tesla model lines — the S, the 3, the X and the Y — spell out “S3XY.” It could be a reference to his past successes at Tesla. Then again, he once sold a pair of short shorts with “S3XY” splayed on the rear end.