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Elon Musk has a protracted historical past with the letter X. What does it symbolize?

First, listed below are 4 new tales from The Atlantic:

Fixing for X

A couple of months in the past, at first of an accidental streak of studying novels with characters named X, I began to turn into curious concerning the letter. First, I learn Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, during which the radical’s protagonist calls his ex-wife “X” as he narrates his model in their shared previous (within the subsequent ebook within the collection, he refers to her as Ann). Quickly, I realized X once more: In Fleur Jaeggy’s Candy Days of Self-discipline, the unnamed teenager narrator refers to herself at one level as “Omit X.” And I lately began Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, during which a widow digs into the hazy previous of her overdue spouse, an artist recognized by the point of her dying as “X.” Those characters are all shot via with ambiguity; they’re individuals who each invite and face up to projection. However in addition they don’t have anything to do with one any other. Why do they proportion the similar title, or, in reality, the absence of a reputation?

X is usually a exhausting idea to pin down. It may be a significant signifier—Fallacious resolution!—and a generic stand-in. The letter is related to such numerous contexts as Christian symbolism, middle-school-math equations, gender neutrality, pornography, a kiss. X each reinforces absence and electrifies gadgets with which means. It’s sacred and profane. X could also be, as of remaining weekend, the brand new title of Twitter.com.

Elon Musk, not up to a 12 months after changing into the landlord of Twitter, modified the web site’s title and brand to X. He has began eliminating chook branding in and across the place of work. 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 the whole lot app—alongside the strains of the Chinese language app WeChat. Linda Yaccarino, the web site’s new leader govt, posted on Twitter (on X?) that “X is the long run state of limitless interactivity—targeted in audio, video, messaging, bills/banking.” (Twitter didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.)

The letter X is each wealthy with connotations and ambiguous, that could be a part of its enchantment for Musk. “After I noticed Elon Musk use [X], I believed, he’s for sure a semiotician, a minimum of in spirit,” Marcel Danesi, an emeritus professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology on the College of Toronto, instructed me. X “reverberates with a wide variety of meanings which can be intuitive, subconscious, and archetypal,” he mentioned. Jamin Pelkey, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan College and the creator of The Semiotics of X, instructed me that “X is each an empty signifier and a signifier of the whole lot … You can not pin it down or say it manner this and best this.” Historical past is marked with X’s, signifying presence and portents: Solitary X marks from greater than 10,000 years in the past had been discovered on cave partitions in Spain, Pelkey instructed me. Within the Center Ages, X circulated as a caution image, an indication of the move, and some way for other people to seal letters, Danesi mentioned.

Musk—a member of Era X—has a protracted and loaded private historical past with the letter. Within the Nineteen Nineties, he co-founded a web based financial institution known as X.com. When X.com merged with an organization that owned PayPal and Musk was the CEO of the brand new entity, he reportedly tried to section out PayPal branding and substitute it with X. On the time, within the early 2000s, Musk argued that the title was once “novel, intriguing, and open-ended,” as Jimmy Soni wrote in his ebook The Founders. However X.com it sounds as if reminded other people an excessive amount of of porn. Quickly, Musk was once ousted from the corporate. He has since used X in each his manufacturers and his private lifestyles: He runs the corporate SpaceX, has created company our bodies known as X Holdings and a start-up known as xAI, and named considered one of his youngsters X Æ A-12.

If X is Musk’s private white whale, his hobby within the letter additionally aligns with broader tendencies in branding. X was once particularly hip on the morning time of the millennium (assume XBox, X Video games): “For advertising functions within the Nineteen Nineties, X had a undeniable 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 title: x.corporate) makes use of the letter to demarcate its secretive “moonshot” initiatives. A start-up accelerator related to Stanford is known as StartX. Certainly, loads of different firms, together with Meta and Microsoft, have intellectual-property rights to X—this means that that Musk and corporate might be dealing with complaints 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 just right are compatible for Musk’s troublemaking, boundary-pushing taste: “The X mark is for extremes.”

Comparable:

Lately’s Information

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Learn. The team of workers 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.

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P.S.

For a have a look at the lifetime of any other guy surrounded by way of symbols and signifiers, I like to recommend studying Patrick Radden Keefe’s article at the artwork broker Larry Gagosian on this week’s New Yorker. The profile charts Gagosian’s upward push from hawking posters in Westwood to brokering offers price tens of tens of millions of greenbacks. It additionally seems to be on the section Gagosian performed in accelerating the function of personal pursuits in artwork, and in reifying wonderful artwork as an funding class. Keefe unearths one of the vital inside machinations of an business that, despite its prominence as an asset elegance, stays in large part unregulated.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this article.

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