Musk:The story that the world's richest man and domain names have to tell!

On January 7th, Tesla's stock price surged, rising over 6% to more than $800 per share. This increase pushed Elon Musk's net worth past $190 billion, surpassing Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and making Musk the world's richest person.

In response, Musk calmly stated on Weibo, "Alright, back to work." This made the onlookers realize that Musk is also a master of the "Versailles literature," referring to his understated response akin to the literature style during the Versailles era.

But did you know that besides being the world's richest person, Musk is also an avid domain name enthusiast? Today, let's talk about the intriguing stories behind Musk and domain names.

Tesla.com

While Tesla is currently enjoying immense success, it wasn't until 2016 that the company resolved its battle with a brand domain name.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk publicly revealed that due to domain name issues, the company couldn't change its name from Tesla Motors to Tesla. After a 13-year wait, in 2016, he finally acquired the brand domain name Tesla.com for $11 million, replacing the old domain name TeslaMotors.com.

This renaming marked the shift from Tesla Motors to Tesla. In 2014, Tesla also acquired the Chinese top-level domains tesla.cn and .com.cn, with tesla.cn serving as the official domain name for Tesla's Chinese website. Additionally, Musk is one of the few holders of the super domain name X.com, and there's an interesting story behind it as well.

X.com

In 1999, Musk founded his second company, X.com (his first company, Zip2, was sold to Compaq). X.com was an online financial services company.

In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity, owned by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, and the merged entity eventually became PayPal. That same year, due to internal conflicts, Musk was ousted from the company, and the domain name X.com remained with PayPal.

In July 2017, Musk spent a significant amount of money to repurchase the domain name X.com from PayPal. While the exact repurchase price remains undisclosed, when asked on LinkedIn by Chinese domain investor Dai Yue about the potential price, U.S. domain investors replied that even if it were $1 billion, Musk wouldn't sell X.com.

According to Musk's tweet response, "Thanks, PayPal, for letting me buy back this domain! I don't have any specific plans for it right now, but for me, this transaction is more of an emotional investment."

SpaceX.com

As early as 2002, when Musk founded SpaceX, he set the ambitious goal of fundamentally changing space technology and eventually enabling human life on other planets. Many at the time considered Musk's ideas fanciful, and SpaceX was seen as a joke.

However, Musk's efforts proved worthwhile. By February 2018, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket had launched 48 times with a success rate of 95.8%. This level of success in a private company was almost miraculous. In the same year, SpaceX's rocket launch share in the commercial market reached 65%.

Musk's SpaceX also adopted the matching domain name SpaceX.com, which helped tightly integrate the domain name with the brand. This fosters a positive interaction between the brand and the domain name, creating a one-to-one correspondence between trademarks, names, and domain names.

As the "dreamer" Musk is, he never gives up. After countless failures and attempts, he's turning his bold promises into reality step by step. Today, Tesla has a market value of $834.172 billion, and SpaceX has become a dominant force in the global aerospace industry.

Musk's emphasis on domain names underscores the understanding that companies investing more effort into domain names have a better chance of standing at the market's pinnacle.