Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter, but rather the lingering regret from 25 years ago.

Writing by: Nusk, Deep Tide TechFlow

Some dreams never die; they are just waiting for the right moment.

The Preemie of 1999

In March 1999, in Palo Alto, 27-year-old Elon Musk 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 the era of Yahoo and AOL; the internet in people’s eyes was just portals. The concept of “online banking” was like selling rockets in the horse-and-buggy era. But Musk’s ideal for X.com was not just an online bank; he wanted to create an online financial operating system: enabling all financial services—transfers, investments, loans, insurance, even daily spending—on one platform.

Silicon Valley thought this South African young man was crazy.

It was the dial-up era, with the screeching of modems. Opening a webpage sometimes took half a minute. Transferring money over a 28.8K slow network? That sounded like a joke.

His ambition was terrifying, but reality hit back even harder.

A year later, X.com merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity (the precursor to PayPal). It should have been a “genius alliance,” but instead, it turned into Silicon Valley’s version of “Game of Thrones.” Thiel and his Stanford elites couldn’t stand Musk’s reckless radicalism, seeing the engineer-turned-CEO as a dangerous lunatic.

In September 2000, disaster struck. Musk flew to Australia for his honeymoon. Just after landing in Sydney, before he could leave the airport, the board called: You’re out.

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

The “financial empire” Musk spent a whole year building was bulldozed by a group of investment bankers in Brioni suits, leaving only a simple function: payments.

In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal, and Musk received $180 million. He had won financially, but at that moment, he felt like a child whose favorite toy was stolen. A fishbone, deeply embedded in his heart.

Over the next twenty years, he built the best electric cars, sent rockets into space, and vowed to die on Mars. But whenever someone mentioned PayPal, he couldn’t hide his loneliness.

X.com remained his inner demon.

Moving the “Washing Basin” into Wall Street

On October 27, 2022, Musk walked into Twitter headquarters holding a washbasin.

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

A pun. Let the washbasin in, and let everything settle.

The outside world thought he bought Twitter for free speech or to clear Trump’s name. They were wrong. Musk wanted revenge—revenge for the betrayal 25 years ago.

The first step was renaming.

X. A single letter, carrying all his anger and ambition. Those who mocked X.com as too ahead of its time back then now would witness its revival on this platform.

But Musk is clever. He knew he couldn’t do it all at once—turn Twitter into a bank would scare users away. So he chose a gradual transformation.

In early 2023, X was still mainly a lightweight social platform limited to 140 characters. 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 post longer, more in-depth content, and the platform began shifting from a short message square to an information hub.

Next, the video feature was significantly enhanced. Musk wanted X to become a one-stop platform for information consumption, so users no longer needed to jump to YouTube or other video sites.

By the end of 2023, the creator revenue sharing program was officially launched. The platform developed an economic ecosystem, allowing content creators to earn income. This was a crucial step—Musk was cultivating users’ transactional habits.

Then came the big moves in 2024.

Applying for financial licenses, building payment systems… Musk was no longer hiding his intentions; he wanted to turn X into a financial platform.

In January 2026, X product head Nikita Bier announced that the platform was developing a Smart Cashtags feature, allowing users to precisely point to specific assets or smart contracts when posting market codes.

Users could embed tags like $TSLA in tweets, displaying real-time stock prices. It seemed just a data display feature, but in fact, it was the final piece of the financial puzzle.

Imagine: you see a news about Nvidia’s new chip on X, and the stock price jumps 5% instantly, then you click the $NVDA tag to buy.

Social, information, trading—three-in-one. This was Musk’s vision for X back in the day.

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

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

In January 2026, Musk announced on X that the latest content recommendation algorithms would be open-sourced within a week, covering both organic and ad content recommendation code, with updates every four weeks and developer notes.

Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok keep their recommendation algorithms as black boxes—no one knows why they see certain content. When it comes to financial services, this opacity becomes a fatal flaw.

Musk used open source to break the black box. Users can review the code, developers can audit security, regulators can supervise compliance.

All to pave the way for financialization.

The Late Validation

X.com in 1999 died of “bad timing.” Back then, the internet was still dial-up, broadband penetration was less than 10%, online payments required dozens of security verifications, and users were full of fear about putting money online.

More critically, the regulatory environment was extremely strict. Banking regulators viewed internet finance as a flood monster, and the government was still feeling its way. Musk’s radical approach seemed too risky in that conservative era.

But history proved his judgment was right.

Only, the validation came too late—and from an unexpected place: China.

In 2011, WeChat launched. Initially just a chat app, it quickly became the super app Musk envisioned. Chat, payments, ride-hailing, food delivery, wealth management—all in one. Alipay also evolved from simple third-party payments into a comprehensive financial platform.

Musk watched this with concern and anxiety.

In June 2022, during his first all-hands meeting with Twitter employees, he openly said: “In China, people basically live on WeChat because it’s very practical and helpful for daily life. I think if we can reach that level on Twitter, or even just close, it would be a huge success.”

This sounded like praise for WeChat and regret for his own failure 25 years ago. Chinese people achieved in ten years what he wanted to do back in 1999.

Now it was his turn.

Mobile payments have rewritten global consumer habits, cryptocurrencies have shifted from geek toys to retirement fund investments, blockchain technology has made decentralized finance a reality, and regulators are beginning to embrace innovation.

The US SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs, the EU launched a digital euro plan, and China’s central bank is piloting digital yuan.

Musk waited 25 years—just for this moment.

With this background, looking at Smart Cashtags, you will understand that Musk’s opponents have never been Zuckerberg.

Meta controls social relationships, Google controls information indexing, Apple controls hardware access. But so far, no tech giant has truly controlled the “fund flow” globally.

This is the ultimate goal of X. Finance is the underlying protocol of the business world. Whoever controls the flow of funds holds the throat of the digital economy. It’s more powerful than just making a search engine or selling phones.

Musk is reshaping a rapid chain from “information” to “decision” to “action.” Imagine: Musk tweets about Tesla’s new technology. Within seconds, 100,000 people click the $TSLA tag. The algorithm analyzes sentiment, predicts trends, automatically pushes trading suggestions, and users place orders with one click. Influence instantly turns into trading volume.

This is the financialization of social media. Wall Street’s traditional model—analysts writing reports, brokers making calls—will appear clumsy and expensive in front of algorithms.

Returning to the initial question: why did Musk acquire Twitter?

The answer was already clear. On October 5, 2022, Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter was to accelerate the creation of the super app “X.”

Only now do people truly understand that statement.

Dreaming back to 1999, the ghost of X.com finally found its revival opportunity. This time, no one can stop him. He is no longer the 27-year-old entrepreneur needing to bow to others; he is the world’s richest man with absolute voice.

Welcome to the X universe

If we zoom out and look beyond Wall Street’s ups and downs and Silicon Valley’s rivalries, you will find a more chilling pattern.

Musk’s obsession with the letter “X” has long transcended the realm of brands, turning into an almost pathological totem worship.

Look at what he has done in these twenty years: When he tried to send humans to Mars, he named his company SpaceX; when he wanted to create a flagship SUV defining Tesla’s future, he insisted on calling it Model X; when he left OpenAI to develop his own AI large model, he named it xAI.

Even he named his most beloved son X Æ A-12, and in daily life, he just calls him “Little X.”

In mathematics, X represents the unknown, the infinite possibilities. But in Musk’s life script, X is that one constant.

Twenty-five years ago, the young man who was driven out by the PayPal board lost his X. Twenty-five years later, now owning rockets, cars, AI, and the world’s largest public opinion arena, he finally retrieved that puzzle piece.

All of it is to make X happen.

Welcome to Musk’s X universe.