Elon Musk‘s latest payments push has an unusually long history. 27 years after he co-founded X.com as an online financial-services company—and more than two decades after that business became PayPal Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL)—Musk is putting financial services back inside X. This time with a social network that can potentially feed the payments system with users, creators and commerce.
From X.com to PayPal
Musk co-founded X.com in 1999 as an online financial-services and email-payments company. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, whose PayPal product was gaining traction, and the combined company adopted the PayPal name in 2001. eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock, with Musk as its largest shareholder.
The connection became relevant again years later. In 2017, Musk bought back the X.com domain from PayPal, saying it had “great sentimental value” to him. At the time, he said he had no plans for it.
Now there is a plan.
X Money Goes Beyond Payments
X Money is being built as financial infrastructure inside X rather than as a standalone payment destination. X Money’s own site describes a service that can handle direct deposits, bill payments, wires, checks and peer-to-peer transfers, alongside an X-branded Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) card and cashback.
The service is being powered by Cross River, which says X is the first U.S. social platform to embed FDIC-insured, interest-bearing accounts and broader payment capabilities directly into the platform.
That distinction matters.
PayPal’s core proposition is still moving and managing money across merchants and consumers. X can potentially make financial activity another layer of the experience users already have on the platform.
That is already beginning with creators. X says U.S. creators eligible for Subscriptions need to enroll in X Money to receive their payouts.
And now, X Money sits inside an even bigger Musk ecosystem: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) owns X following its combination with xAI, putting Musk’s revived financial-services vision alongside his AI, social-media and space businesses.
The Everything-App Test
This is where Musk’s original X.com vision comes back into focus.
Rather than asking whether X Money can take users from PayPal, the more consequential question is whether X can make money itself part of the social network’s underlying infrastructure.
The timing is particularly interesting for PayPal. The company is in the middle of a strategic reset under CEO Enrique Lores, and a reported $53 billion acquisition attempt by Advent and Stripe fell apart in August after the consortium walked away. PayPal shares subsequently fell sharply.
The contrast is striking: PayPal is trying to strengthen its position as a payments company, while Musk is attempting to make payments one component of a much broader platform.
X Money’s biggest opportunity may not be transaction fees. It is the possibility of making payments that reinforces everything else on X—creator income, subscriptions, commerce, and eventually other financial services.
The key metric to watch is therefore not how closely X Money resembles PayPal, but how much financial activity Musk can pull into X that previously happened somewhere else.
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