This entire endeavour not sure whether conscious or unconscious is Musk trying to -- gosh, there's a word for this but my English is failing me -- to finally get even with Thiel, to show Thiel he can do everything Thiel did but better. Someone like Musk never fully recovers from getting fired from his dear X.com post-merge. Make no mistake: back then Musk was doing a stupid by trying to force a Windows tech stack on a payment company which was using Unix.

Thiel was one of the largest donors of Trump in 2016, is a true darling of the alt right so of course Musk must rub shoulders with them.

Between the erstwhile x.com and Confinity the company which launched PayPal, the latter succeeded, gobbled up x.com so now of course Musk must show to Thiel that he can make a successful payment company called x.com. He must.

That's the reason for all this bullshit, I am certain.