Musk didn't buy Twitter; he bought a 25-year-old grievance.

Written by: Niu Keke , Deep Tide TechFlow

Some dreams never die; they just wait for their chance.

Premature babies born in 1999

In March 1999, Elon Musk, then 27, made a decision that seemed almost absurd at the time.

He bet all $22 million he earned from selling Zip2 on a website called X.com.

At that time, Silicon Valley was still dominated by Yahoo and AOL, and people equated the internet with portal websites. Introducing the concept of "online banking" at that point was like trying to sell rockets in the age of horse-drawn carriages. But Musk's ideal X.com was more than just an online bank; he wanted to create an online financial operating system: a platform that would handle all financial services—transfers, investments, loans, insurance, and even everyday purchases—all on one page.

At the time, Silicon Valley thought this young man from South Africa was crazy.

Back in the dial-up era, with the piercing screeching of modems, opening a webpage could sometimes take half a minute. Asking users to transfer money on a snail's pace of 28.8K? That sounded like a joke.

Their ambitions were terrifying, but reality responded even more harshly.

A year later, X.com merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity (the predecessor to PayPal). What should have been a "golden partnership" turned into a Silicon Valley version of "Game of Thrones." Thiel's Stanford elites disapproved of Musk's haphazard radicalism, thinking this CEO with an engineering background was simply a dangerous madman.

In September 2000, the collapse occurred. Musk flew to Australia for his honeymoon. Just as his flight landed in Sydney, before he even stepped out of the airport, the board called: You're out.

Peter Thiel took over everything. A few months later, the "X.com" sign that Musk loved was taken down, and the company was renamed PayPal.

The foundation of Musk's "financial empire," which he spent a whole year building, was leveled by a group of investment bankers dressed in custom Brioni suits, leaving only the simplest function: payment.

In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal, and Musk received $180 million. He won in terms of wealth, but at that moment, he felt like a child whose beloved toy had been snatched away. A fishbone had lodged deep in his heart.

Over the next two decades, he built the best electric car, sent rockets into space, and vowed to die on Mars. But whenever someone mentions PayPal, he can't hide his melancholy.

X.com remained his inner demon.

Bringing the "washbasin" to Wall Street

On October 27, 2022, Musk walked into Twitter's headquarters building, carrying a sink.

This detail was later widely reported by the media, but the real signal was the sentence he wrote on Twitter: "Let that sink in."

A pun. Let the sink in, and let everything settle down.

The outside world thought he bought Twitter for freedom of speech or to seek justice for Trump. They were wrong. Musk wanted revenge—revenge for the betrayal 25 years ago.

The first step is to change the name.

X. A single letter that embodies all his anger and ambition. Those who mocked X.com for being too ahead of its time will now witness its resurrection on this platform.

But Musk is smart. He knew he couldn't do it all at once; turning Twitter directly into a bank would scare away users. So he chose a gradual approach.

In early 2023, X was 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, getting users used to spending money on the platform.

By mid-year, the long-post feature was launched. Users could publish longer and more in-depth content, and the platform began to transform from a short message square into an information center.

Next came a significant enhancement to the video functionality. Musk wanted X to be a one-stop platform for information consumption, eliminating the need for users 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 have an economic ecosystem, allowing users to earn money through content creation. This was a crucial step; Musk was cultivating users' transacting habits.

Then comes the big move in 2024.

Financial license applications, payment system construction... Musk is no longer hiding anything; he wants to turn X into a financial platform.

In January 2026, Nikita Bier, the product manager for X, stated that the platform was developing the Smart Cashtags feature, which would allow users to pinpoint specific assets or smart contracts when publishing market data.

Users can embed hashtags like $TSLA in their tweets to display the stock price in real time. What may seem like just an information display feature is actually the final piece of the financialization puzzle.

Imagine this: You see a news item on X about Nvidia's new chip, and the stock price immediately jumps 5%. You then click on the $NVDA tag to place a buy order.

Social interaction, information, and transactions—this was the vision Musk wanted to achieve at X.com.

From city squares to information centers, and then to trading halls, Musk spent two years guiding users step by step to accept X's transformation.

To dispel users' doubts, Musk made an unprecedented decision: to open-source all algorithms.

On January 10, 2026, Musk announced at X that he would officially open-source the latest content recommendation algorithm for the X platform within a week, covering the code for recommending organic and advertising content, and would update it every four weeks with developer notes.

The recommendation algorithms of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are black boxes; nobody knows why they see certain content. This lack of transparency becomes a fatal flaw when it comes to financial services.

Musk broke the black box with open source. Users can inspect the code, developers can audit security, and regulators can oversee compliance.

Everything was just paving the way for financialization.

Belated verification

X.com died in 1999 due to "bad timing." At that time, the Internet was still in the dial-up era, broadband penetration was less than 10%, online payments required more than a dozen security verifications, and users were terrified of putting their money online.

More importantly, the regulatory environment was extremely stringent. Banking regulators viewed internet finance as a dangerous threat, and the government was also proceeding cautiously. Musk's aggressive strategy seemed too risky in that conservative era.

But history has proven him right.

The verification came too late, and from an unexpected place: China.

In 2011, WeChat was launched. Initially just a chat application, it quickly transformed into the super app that Elon Musk had envisioned. It could do everything from chatting and making payments to hailing rides, ordering food, and managing finances. Alipay also evolved from a simple third-party payment platform into a comprehensive financial platform.

Musk saw this and was very anxious.

In June 2022, at his first all-hands meeting with Twitter employees, he publicly stated: "In China, people basically live on WeChat because it's so practical and helpful for daily life. I think if we can reach that level on Twitter, or even just get close to it, it would be a huge success."

This sounds like a compliment to WeChat, but also a regret for his failure 25 years ago. The Chinese people accomplished in ten years what he had wanted to do back in 1999.

Now it's his turn.

Mobile payments have reshaped global consumer habits, and cryptocurrencies have transformed from geek toys into investment targets for pension funds. Blockchain technology has made decentralized finance a reality. Regulators are also beginning to embrace innovation.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a Bitcoin ETF, the European Union has launched a digital euro plan, and the People's Bank of China is piloting a digital yuan.

Musk has been waiting for this opportunity for 25 years.

With this background in mind, when you look at Smart Cashtags, you'll understand that Musk's real rival has never been Zuckerberg.

Meta controls social relationships, Google controls information indexing, and Apple controls hardware entry points. But so far, no single tech giant has truly controlled the global flow of funds.

This is the ultimate fate of X. Finance is the underlying protocol of the business world. Whoever controls the flow of funds holds the digital economy by the throat. This is far more devastating than creating a search engine or selling a mobile phone.

Musk is reshaping a high-speed chain from "information" to "decision-making" to "action." Imagine this: Musk tweets about a new Tesla technology. Within seconds, hundreds of thousands of people click on the $TSLA hashtag. Algorithms predict trends based on sentiment analysis, automatically pushing trading suggestions, and users place orders with a single click. Influence instantly translates into trading volume.

This is the financialization of social interaction. The traditional Wall Street model, with analysts writing research reports and brokers making phone calls, will appear clumsy and expensive in the face of algorithms.

Going back to the original question, why did Musk acquire Twitter?

The answer was already known: on October 5, 2022, Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter accelerated the creation of the super app "X".

Only now do people truly understand this statement.

Back in 1999, the ghost of X.com finally had its chance to rise again. This time, no one could stop him. He was no longer the 27-year-old entrepreneur who had to depend on others, but the world's richest man with absolute power.

Welcome to Universe X

If we zoom out and step outside the ups and downs of Wall Street and the feuds of Silicon Valley, we will discover an even more chilling pattern.

Musk's obsession with the letter "X" has long transcended the realm of commercial branding, transforming into an almost pathological form of totem worship.

Look at what he has done in the past twenty years: When he tried to send humans to Mars, he named the company SpaceX; when he wanted to build a flagship SUV that would define the future of Tesla, he insisted on calling it Model X despite the resistance; when he left OpenAI to develop his own large-scale artificial intelligence model, he named it xAI.

He even named his most beloved son X Æ A-12, but in daily life, he only called him "Little X".

In mathematics, X represents an unknown, representing infinite possibilities. But in Musk's life story, X is the only constant.

25 years ago, the young man ousted from PayPal's board of directors lost his X. 25 years later, the richest man in the world, who owns rockets, cars, AI, and the world's largest media sphere, has finally picked up that piece of the puzzle again.

Everything, everything, is for the purpose of making X happen.

Welcome to Musk's X Universe.