Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and SpaceX, is a pioneer of online businesses.

New Delhi:

After saying he’d honour the $44-billion deal to buy Twitter, billionaire businessman Elon Musk has sent out another one-line tweet with two big hints. He is clearly interested again in buying Twitter after being sued for backing out earlier. And he plans to use it as a launchpad to eventually launch his own, “everything” app called “X”.

His tweet today read: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” He did not specify what he means by “everything”, though he has in the past said he plans to make his own social media platform “X.com” to rival Twitter. 

When a Twitter user (@LarckeningXuruo) suggested “it would have been easier to just start X from scratch”, Elon Musk replied with: “Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong.”

It came on a day on which Mr Musk, the world’s richest person by several estimates, offered to go ahead with the Twitter buyout at the original agreed price, less than two weeks before the scheduled start of the court case filed by Twitter as he’d tried to withdraw from the deal citing too many “fake users” or “bots” on the platform. The trial is otherwise to begin on October 17.

It’s not his first time teasing plans around “X”, though — a letter that has sentimental value for him and he uses it as a signature name for some of his businesses, such as SpaceX. 

In August, when a Twitter user asked if he’d ever consider his own platform if the Twitter deal fell apart, he had responded with: “X.com”.

Elon Musk has owned the internet domain “X.com” for years, first having used it for an online bank before the turn of the century, when the internet was not on every phone as it is now. That business was later merged into PayPal, a pioneering online payment system, and then went to eBay, one of the world’s first e-commerce companies, in 2002.

He bought back the domain “X.com” from PayPal five years ago for an undisclosed sum. He had cited sentimental value as the reason.