Behind Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the unknown "little secret"

This article comes fromTwitter, Original author: @CroissantEth

Odaily Translator |

Odaily Translator |

Elon Musk has recently officially completed the acquisition of social networking giant Twitter. There are some very interesting things that happened behind this acquisition, and there are also "little secrets" that are not known. Although some cases may be human speculation, it is also worth investigating in depth. Next, Odaily will take you to pick it up.

The beginning of this story can be traced back to 1999. That year, Elon Musk sold the Zip2 company he founded to Compaq Computers (Compaq Computer) for $307 million, and since Elon Musk held a 7% stake in the company, he received $22 million in funding.

A month after the sale was completed, Elon Musk invested $12 million in x.com, one of the first online banks in the world. In 2000, x.com announced its merger with Confinity Corporation, which later became payments giant PayPal. The next story Many people know that Elon Musk failed in the "company infighting" and his CEO position was replaced by Peter Thiel, but fortunately, PayPal allowed Elon Musk to retain the shares.

In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, giving Elon Musk approximately $175.8 million.

Interestingly, the x.com website did not cease operations during this sequence of events, the domain name was bought back from PayPal by Elon Musk in July 2017, which Musk said had great sentimental value to him.

If you go to x.com now, there is nothing but a mysterious "x" on the page.

So how does the x.com story relate to the Twitter acquisition?

In fact, here's where the funniest part is - Elon Musk has bought Twitter for $44 billion, but unbeknownst to many, the billionaire has registered three holding companies under the name "X Holdings," And used these three companies to complete the acquisition transaction.Due to the many legal issues involved in this acquisition transaction, many internal information and chat records were disclosed in the court process, among which

Elon Musk has detailed his intentions to use blockchain technology for Twitter. The message below is a screenshot of a chat between Elon Musk (labeled self) and SBF, Jack Dorsey, et al…

In this chat transcript below, Elon Musk describes his plan: "I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that can both pay and send short text messages/links like Twitter does, the challenge is a massive real-time database , this database needs to hold all in-memory blockchain messages.”

In the following news, there is a chat record between Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, which also involves the idea of ​​using blockchain technology on social media. Jack Dorsey: "Twitter should have been a protocol in the first place, not a company." Elon Musk: "I think trying to make Twitter develop in a better direction and do some new things, like decentralization, It's all worth it."

In a chat with FTX founder SBF, Elon Musk also detailed his "Plan B": "My Plan B is a blockchain-based version of Twitter, where 'tweets' are embedded in transactions as comments. So you might pay 0.1 DOGE per comment or retweet."

In a chat with his brother Kimbal Musk, Kimbal Musk proposed a wallet idea that Elon Musk liked: "Will Twitter let users pay tokens related to services? You (Elon Musk) have to put the tokens in the wallet Only middle-level people can realize this function, and as the scale expands, the wallet will become a huge business purely for the benefit of users.”

In short, the general consensus is that a blockchain-based Twitter will alleviate the problem of bots and scams at scale. It will also offer a degree of resistance to censorship, unlike other social media apps today.

Next, let's go back to x.com.

As the dust settled on the Twitter acquisition deal, Elon Musk sent out an intriguing tweet that mentioned "X":http://x.comWhen asked if he would consider making his own social media application, Elon Musk also mentioned

, and in a recent interview, Elon Musk talked about building this super app and cryptocurrency.

If you think Elon Musk's "X-crypto dream" is still too far off to be realized, think again. Twitter is not exclusive of cryptocurrencies, it embeds NFT, and launched a decentralized social network called "Bluesky" in 2019, and is even secretly building an encrypted wallet (may be useful for Musk's vision... ).

Finally, we have another piece of the puzzle to bring it all together. Just a few days ago, Binance announced that it became an equity investor in Twitter (the exchange invested $500 million in the acquisition), and also formed a team to help Twitter use blockchain technology to fight bots.