Musk’s fascination with the letter ‘X’

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Elon Musk has a protracted historical past with the letter X. What does it signify?

First, listed here are 4 new tales from The Atlantic:

Fixing for X

A number of months in the past, firstly of an unintended streak of studying novels with characters named X, I began to change into curious concerning the letter. First, I learn Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, during which the novel’s protagonist calls his ex-wife “X” as he narrates his model of their shared previous (within the subsequent e book within the sequence, he refers to her as Ann). Quickly, I noticed X once more: In Fleur Jaeggy’s Candy Days of Self-discipline, the unnamed teen narrator refers to herself at one level as “Miss X.” And I not too long ago began Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, during which a widow digs into the hazy previous of her late spouse, an artist recognized by the point of her loss of life as “X.” These characters are all shot by means of with ambiguity; they’re individuals who each invite and resist projection. However additionally they don’t have anything to do with each other. Why do they share the identical identify, or, actually, the absence of a reputation?

X is usually a onerous idea to pin down. It may be a significant signifier—Improper reply!—and a generic stand-in. The letter is related to such different contexts as Christian symbolism, middle-school-math equations, gender neutrality, pornography, a kiss. X each reinforces absence and electrifies objects with that means. It’s sacred and profane. X can also be, as of final weekend, the brand new identify of Twitter.com.

Elon Musk, lower than a yr after changing into the proprietor of Twitter, modified the location’s identify and emblem to X. He has began eradicating hen branding in and across the workplace. He’s reportedly projecting “X” in Twitter’s cafeteria and renaming convention rooms “eXposure” and “s3Xy.” The rebrand, Musk has mentioned, is a step towards remodeling Twitter into an the whole lot app—alongside the strains of the Chinese language app WeChat. Linda Yaccarino, the location’s new chief govt, posted on Twitter (on X?) that “X is the long run state of limitless interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, funds/banking.” (Twitter didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.)

The letter X is each wealthy with connotations and ambiguous, which can be a part of its enchantment for Musk. “After I noticed Elon Musk use [X], I assumed, he’s positively a semiotician, a minimum of in spirit,” Marcel Danesi, an emeritus professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology on the College of Toronto, instructed me. X “reverberates with every kind of meanings which are intuitive, unconscious, and archetypal,” he mentioned. Jamin Pelkey, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan College and the creator of The Semiotics of X, instructed me that “X is each an empty signifier and a signifier of the whole lot … You can not pin it down or say it means this and solely this.” Historical past is marked with X’s, signifying presence and portents: Solitary X marks from greater than 10,000 years in the past have been discovered on cave partitions in Spain, Pelkey instructed me. Within the Center Ages, X circulated as a warning image, an indication of the cross, and a manner for individuals to seal letters, Danesi mentioned.

Musk—a member of Era X—has a protracted and loaded private historical past with the letter. Within the Nineteen Nineties, he co-founded a web based financial institution referred to as X.com. When X.com merged with an organization that owned PayPal and Musk turned the CEO of the brand new entity, he reportedly tried to section out PayPal branding and substitute it with X. On the time, within the early 2000s, Musk argued that the identify was “novel, intriguing, and open-ended,” as Jimmy Soni wrote in his e book The Founders. However X.com apparently reminded individuals an excessive amount of of porn. Quickly, Musk was ousted from the corporate. He has since used X in each his manufacturers and his private life: He runs the corporate SpaceX, has created company our bodies referred to as X Holdings and a start-up referred to as xAI, and named considered one of his youngsters X Æ A-12.

If X is Musk’s private white whale, his curiosity within the letter additionally aligns with broader tendencies in branding. X was particularly hip on the daybreak of the millennium (suppose XBox, X Video games): “For advertising and marketing functions within the Nineteen Nineties, X had a sure cool,” Stella Bugbee wrote this week in The New York Instances. “It conferred a rejection of authority.” Within the years since, X has retained cachet in Silicon Valley, the place Google’s X (previously “Google X,” area identify: x.firm) makes use of the letter to demarcate its secretive “moonshot” initiatives. A start-up accelerator related to Stanford known as StartX. Certainly, a whole bunch of different firms, together with Meta and Microsoft, have intellectual-property rights to X—which implies that Musk and firm may very well be dealing with lawsuits over the identify quickly.

X’s ambiguity is what makes the letter so compelling. And, Pelkey famous, that’s a part of what makes it a great match for Musk’s troublemaking, boundary-pushing model: “The X mark is for extremes.”

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P.S.

For a take a look at the lifetime of one other man surrounded by symbols and signifiers, I like to recommend studying Patrick Radden Keefe’s article on the artwork vendor Larry Gagosian on this week’s New Yorker. The profile charts Gagosian’s rise from hawking posters in Westwood to brokering offers price tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars}. It additionally seems on the half Gagosian performed in accelerating the function of personal pursuits in artwork, and in reifying effective artwork as an funding class. Keefe reveals a number of the internal machinations of an trade that, regardless of its prominence as an asset class, stays largely unregulated.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this article.

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