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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, at the beginning of an unintended streak of studying novels with characters named X, I began to turn out to be curious in regards to the letter. First, I learn Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, by which 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 just lately began Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, by which a widow digs into the hazy previous of her late spouse, an artist recognized by the point of her demise as “X.” These characters are all shot via 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 identify, or, actually, the absence of a reputation?
X could be a exhausting idea to pin down. It may be a significant signifier—Flawed reply!—and a generic stand-in. The letter is related to such diverse contexts as Christian symbolism, middle-school-math equations, gender neutrality, pornography, a kiss. X each reinforces absence and electrifies objects with which 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 turning into the proprietor of Twitter, modified the location’s identify and brand 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 every part 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 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 enchantment for Musk. “After I noticed Elon Musk use [X], I believed, 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, advised me. X “reverberates with all types 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, advised me that “X is each an empty signifier and a signifier of every part … 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 advised me. Within the Center Ages, X circulated as a warning image, an indication of the cross, and a approach 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 Nineties, he co-founded an internet financial institution referred to 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 part out PayPal branding and change 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 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 referred to as X Holdings and a start-up referred to as xAI, and named one in every of his kids X Æ A-12.
If X is Musk’s private white whale, his curiosity within the letter additionally aligns with broader developments in branding. X was particularly hip on the daybreak of the millennium (suppose XBox, X Video games): “For advertising functions within the Nineties, X had a sure cool,” Stella Bugbee wrote this week in The New York Occasions. “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 is named StartX. Certainly, tons of of different firms, together with Meta and Microsoft, have intellectual-property rights to X—which signifies that Musk and firm might 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 an excellent match for Musk’s troublemaking, boundary-pushing fashion: “The X mark is for extremes.”
Associated:
At the moment’s Information
- Hunter Biden’s plea deal over federal tax expenses is on maintain after a decide expressed concern over the phrases for a separate felony gun cost.
- Water temperatures across the tip of South Florida have reached triple digits, and might be the most popular seawater measurement ever collected.
- Seven main automakers plan to make investments a minimum of $1 billion to construct a community of electric-vehicle chargers throughout the USA and Canada.
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.
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 appears on the half Gagosian performed in accelerating the function of personal pursuits in artwork, and in reifying fantastic artwork as an funding class. Keefe reveals a number of the inside machinations of an trade that, regardless of its prominence as an asset class, stays largely unregulated.
— Lora
Katherine Hu contributed to this text.
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