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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:
Solving for X
Just a few months in the past, in the beginning of an unintended streak of studying novels with characters named X, I began to develop into curious concerning the letter. First, I learn Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, during which the novel’s protagonist calls his ex-wife “X” as he narrates his model of their shared previous (within the subsequent e-book within the collection, he refers to her as Ann). Soon, I noticed X once more: In Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of 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, during 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 by with ambiguity; they’re individuals who each invite and resist projection. But additionally they don’t have anything to do with each other. Why do they share the identical title, or, actually, the absence of a reputation?
X could be a onerous idea to pin down. It could be a significant signifier—Wrong 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 is sacred and profane. X can be, as of final weekend, the brand new title of Twitter.com.
Elon Musk, lower than a 12 months after changing into the proprietor of Twitter, modified the positioning’s title and brand to X. He has began eradicating hen branding in and across the workplace. He is reportedly projecting “X” in Twitter’s cafeteria and renaming convention rooms “eXposure” and “s3Xy.” The rebrand, Musk has stated, is a step towards remodeling Twitter into an every thing app—alongside the strains of the Chinese app WeChat. Linda Yaccarino, the positioning’s new chief govt, posted on Twitter (on X?) that “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/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 attraction for Musk. “When I saw Elon Musk use [X], I thought, he’s definitely a semiotician, at least in spirit,” Marcel Danesi, an emeritus professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology on the University of Toronto, instructed me. X “reverberates with all kinds of meanings that are intuitive, unconscious, and archetypal,” he stated. Jamin Pelkey, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and the writer of The Semiotics of X, instructed me that “X is both an empty signifier and a signifier of everything … You cannot pin it down or say it means this and only this.” History 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 instructed me. In the Middle Ages, X circulated as a warning image, an indication of the cross, and a manner for folks to seal letters, Danesi stated.
Musk—a member of Generation X—has a protracted and loaded private historical past with the letter. In the Nineteen 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 turned the CEO of the brand new entity, he reportedly tried to section out PayPal branding and substitute it with X. At the time, within the early 2000s, Musk argued that the title was “novel, intriguing, and open-ended,” as Jimmy Soni wrote in his e-book The Founders. But X.com apparently reminded folks an excessive amount of of porn. Soon, 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 considered one of his kids X Æ A-12.
If X is Musk’s private white whale, his curiosity within the letter additionally aligns with broader tendencies in branding. X was particularly hip on the daybreak of the millennium (suppose XBox, X Games): “For marketing purposes in the 1990s, X had a certain cool,” Stella Bugbee wrote this week in The New York Times. “It conferred a rejection of authority.” In the years since, X has retained cachet in Silicon Valley, the place Google’s X (previously “Google X,” area title: x.firm) makes use of the letter to demarcate its secretive “moonshot” tasks. A start-up accelerator related to Stanford known as StartX. Indeed, lots of of different corporations, together with Meta and Microsoft, have intellectual-property rights to X—which implies that Musk and firm might be dealing with lawsuits over the title quickly.
X’s ambiguity is what makes the letter so compelling. And, Pelkey famous, that’s a part of what makes it a great match for Musk’s troublemaking, boundary-pushing model: “The X mark is for extremes.”
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Read. 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 hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. It additionally seems to be on the half Gagosian performed in accelerating the function of personal pursuits in artwork, and in reifying tremendous artwork as an funding class. Keefe reveals a few of the internal machinations of an trade that, regardless of its prominence as an asset class, stays largely unregulated.
— Lora
Katherine Hu contributed to this article.
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