After years of transition and a branding overhaul under owner Elon Musk, Twitter has finally changed its domain name to X.com. The change went live early Friday morning, notifying users upon loading up the site on a web browser with a banner at the bottom of the screen.”Welcome to X.com!” the banner reads. “We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same.” The message also includes a link to the site’s privacy policy.Prior to Friday’s domain name push, X.com or Twitter.com worked to access the site. This change mainly affects those who preferred the Twitter URL and typed it into their browsers instead. Now, that URL should immediately redirect to the new one. PCMag was redirected from Twitter.com to X.com in tests on Chrome, Firefox, and Brave web browsers on a Windows 11 PC and a Macbook Pro, but not all users are being redirected just yet. “All core systems are now on X.com,” Musk confirmed Friday in a post about the transition.It’s arguably one of the biggest changes to ultimately happen to Twitter besides its logo change since Musk bought the social media platform for $44 billion back in 2022. In response to the @X account’s post about the domain change, some users expressed that they still want to call the site Twitter.
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(Credit: X/PCMag)
But Musk’s interest in X.com goes all the way back to the early days of the internet, when Musk first bought the domain name from tech founders Marcel DePaolis and Dave Weinstein in 1999. As journalist and author Jimmy Soni explains, Musk thought at the time that X.com was “the coolest URL on the internet.” Musk wanted it for his financial startup at the time, and paid DePaolis and Weinstein in cash and equity in his new venture. But Musk didn’t hold onto X.com forever. Over a decade later, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO bought the domain name again in 2017, crediting his involvement with PayPal for helping him retrieve the domain. Archives of the domain show that it had been home to PayPal and then connected to eBay subsidiary XCommerce. Musk changed X.com to a blank white page with just the letter “X” on it after he regained ownership. At the time, Musk said: “No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me.”
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