A letter, a dream, runs through a lifetime.

Some obsessions never fade away; they are just waiting for the right moment.

The big gamble of 1999

In March 1999, in Palo Alto, a 27-year-old entrepreneur did something almost no one understood at the time. He invested all $22 million he earned from selling his previous company into founding a website called X.com.

Back then, Silicon Valley was still dominated by Yahoo and AOL, and the internet was synonymous with portal sites. In an era of dial-up internet and screeching modems, talking about "online banking" was like selling rockets in the horse-and-buggy era.

But this young man from South Africa had ambitions far beyond that. X.com was not just an online bank; he wanted to create a networked financial operating system—allowing transfers, investments, loans, insurance, and consumption to flow on a single platform. No one could have imagined such a scene at the time.

Silicon Valley elites debated fiercely; some openly called it the delusions of a lunatic. With 28.8K internet speeds, loading a webpage took half a minute, let alone expecting users to transfer money at that speed? It sounded like a huge joke.

The harsh reality struck quickly. A year later, X.com was forced to merge with another payment company, Confinity. Theoretically, it was a powerful alliance, but in practice, it became a power struggle in Silicon Valley. The elite team from Stanford looked down on this radical approach, thinking he was too reckless and lacked discipline.

And in the end? The merged company was renamed PayPal, but that original dream was suppressed. Twenty-six years later, when X was launched as a social payment platform, the young man's vision finally found its time.