Musk’s fascination with the letter ‘X’

That is an version of The Atlantic Day by day, a publication that guides you thru the largest tales of the day, helps you uncover new concepts, and recommends the most effective in tradition. Join it right here.

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 couple of months in the past, at first of an unintended streak of studying novels with characters named X, I began to develop into curious concerning the letter. First, I learn Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, wherein the novel’s protagonist calls his ex-wife “X” as he narrates his model of their shared previous (within the subsequent guide 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 lately began Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, wherein a widow digs into the hazy previous of her late spouse, an artist identified by the point of her demise as “X.” These characters are all shot by means of with ambiguity; they’re individuals who each invite and resist projection. However in addition they don’t have anything to do with each other. Why do they share the identical title, or, actually, the absence of a reputation?

X generally is a arduous idea to pin down. It may be a significant signifier—Incorrect reply!—and a generic stand-in. The letter is related to such various 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 title of Twitter.com.

Elon Musk, lower than a 12 months after turning into the proprietor of Twitter, modified the location’s title and emblem to X. He has began eradicating fowl 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 reworking Twitter into an all the pieces app—alongside the traces of the Chinese language app WeChat. Linda Yaccarino, the location’s new chief govt, posted on Twitter (on X?) that “X is the longer term 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 attraction for Musk. “After I noticed Elon Musk use [X], I assumed, he’s positively a semiotician, no less than 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 might be intuitive, unconscious, and archetypal,” he mentioned. Jamin Pelkey, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan College and the writer of The Semiotics of X, instructed me that “X is each an empty signifier and a signifier of all the pieces … 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 means for individuals to seal letters, Danesi mentioned.

Musk—a member of Technology X—has a protracted and loaded private historical past with the letter. Within the Nineteen Nineties, he co-founded a web-based financial institution known as X.com. When X.com merged with an organization that owned PayPal and Musk grew to become the CEO of the brand new entity, he reportedly tried to section out PayPal branding and exchange it with X. On the time, within the early 2000s, Musk argued that the title was “novel, intriguing, and open-ended,” as Jimmy Soni wrote in his guide 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 known as X Holdings and a start-up known as xAI, and named one in all his kids 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 (assume 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 title: x.firm) makes use of the letter to demarcate its secretive “moonshot” tasks. A start-up accelerator related to Stanford known as StartX. Certainly, a whole lot of different firms, together with Meta and Microsoft, have intellectual-property rights to X—which signifies that Musk and firm could possibly be going through lawsuits over the title quickly.

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

Associated:

At the moment’s Information

Extra From The Atlantic

Tradition Break

Learn. The employees author Ross Andersen displays on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1949 plea within the pages of The Atlantic for hope.

Watch. Survival of the Thickest (streaming on Netflix) stars the comic Michelle Buteau as a brokenhearted stylist wrestling with the indignity and pleasure of beginning over after a breakup.

Play our every day crossword.

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 seller Larry Gagosian on this week’s New Yorker. The profile charts Gagosian’s rise from hawking posters in Westwood to brokering offers value tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars}. It additionally appears to be like on the half Gagosian performed in accelerating the function of personal pursuits in artwork, and in reifying advantageous artwork as an funding class. Keefe reveals a number of the inside machinations of an business that, despite its prominence as an asset class, stays largely unregulated.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this text.

If you purchase a guide utilizing a hyperlink on this publication, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.