Formerly | Global Link Information Network (1995–1996) |
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Company type | Private |
Founded | November 6, 1995 |
Founder |
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Defunct | July 28, 2003 (7 years, 8 months and 22 days) |
Fate | Purchased by Compaq Computer |
Headquarters | , |
Area served | United States |
Products |
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Parent | Compaq Computer (1999–) |
Website | zip2.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 2 February 1999) |
Footnotes /references [1] |
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Companies In popular culture
Related
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Zip2 Corp. [2] was a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. [3] The company was founded in Palo Alto, California as Global Link Information Network, Inc. on November 9, 1995, [4] by Greg Kouri and brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk. Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence, [5] : 61 but later began to assist newspapers in designing online city guides before being purchased by Compaq Computer in 2000.
Elon got the initial business idea from a summer internship in 1994. A Yellow Pages salesman came into his employer's office to pitch buying an online business listing in addition to the traditional listing on the big fat Yellow Page book. [6]
Global Link Information Network, Inc. was incorporated in November 1995 by brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk and Greg Kouri in Palo Alto, California with money raised from a small group of angel investors, [7] [8] [9] plus US$8,000 from Kouri. [10] [5] In Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk, it is claimed that Musks' father, Errol Musk, provided them with US$28,000 during this time, [5] : Ch.4 but Elon Musk later denied this. [7] He later said that his dad provided around 10% of US$200,000 as part of a later funding round. [10]
Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence by linking their services to searchers and providing directions. [5] : 61 Elon Musk combined a free Navteq database with a Palo Alto business database to create the first system. [5]
In 1996, Global Link received US$3 million in investments from Mohr Davidow Ventures and officially changed its name to Zip2. [5] Davidow Ventures changed the fundamental strategy of Zip2 from localised direct to business sales to instead selling national back end software packages to newspapers to build their own directories. [5] Elon Musk was appointed the Chief Technology Officer and Rich Sorkin became the chief executive officer. Zip2 trademarked "We Power the Press" as its official slogan and continued to grow. [5] Zip2 struck deals with The New York Times , Knight Ridder, and Hearst Corporation, [5] and its collaboration with newspapers made it a major component of "the U.S. newspaper industry's response to the online city guide industry", according to the Editor & Publisher . [11]
By 1998, the company had partnered with about 160 newspapers to develop guides to cities, either locally or at full scale. According to chairman and co-founder Elon Musk, twenty of those newspapers led to full-scale city guides. The New York Times reported that Zip2 also provided newspapers with an online directory, calendar, and email alongside their core offering. [12]
Zip2 allowed for two-way communication between users and advertisers. Users could message advertisers and have that message forwarded to their fax machine. Likewise, advertisers could fax users and users could view that fax using specific URLs. [13] [14]
One Zip2 product was called "Auto Guide". AutoGuide connected online newspaper users with local dealership or private party car sellers. [13]
In April 1998, Zip2 attempted to merge with CitySearch, its main competitor. While Musk initially supported the merger, [15] he persuaded the board of directors not to proceed with it. [16] According to The New York Times, the two companies "cited incompatibilities in cultures and technology" as the reason for the merger's failure. [17]
In February 1999, Compaq Computer paid US$305 million to acquire Zip2. Elon and Kimbal Musk, the original founders, netted US$22 million and US$15 million respectively. [18] [19] The company was purchased to enhance Compaq's AltaVista web search engine. [20] [21]
Telecommunications is one of the most modern, diverse and fast-growing sectors in the economy of Ukraine. Unlike country's dominating export industries, the telecommunications, as well as the related Internet sector, remain largely unaffected by the global economic crisis, ranking high in European and global rankings.
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor. He is the founder, chairman, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO, product architect, and former chairman of Tesla, Inc.; owner, executive chairman, and CTO of X Corp.; founder of the Boring Company and xAI; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the Musk Foundation. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world; as of April 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be $178 billion.
X.com was an American online bank founded by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. In 2000, it merged with competitor Confinity and in 2001, the merged company changed its name to PayPal.
Tesla, Inc. is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company headquartered in Austin, Texas, which designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar shingles, and related products and services.
Gary Gensler is an American government official and former Goldman Sachs investment banker serving as the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Gensler previously led the Biden–Harris transition's Federal Reserve, Banking, and Securities Regulators agency review team. Prior to his appointment, he was professor of Practice of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
X, commonly referred to by its former name Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks and the fifth-most visited website in the world. Users can share text messages, images, and videos through short posts. X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature.
Kimbal James Musk is a South African restaurateur, chef, and entrepreneur. He owns The Kitchen Restaurant Group, a collection of restaurants located in Colorado and Chicago. He is the co-founder and chairman of Big Green, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has built hundreds of outdoor classrooms called Learning Gardens in schoolyards across America. Musk is also the co-founder and chairman of Square Roots, an urban farming company growing food in hydroponic, indoor, climate controlled shipping containers. Musk currently sits on the boards of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, both of which his brother Elon is the current CEO. He was on the board of Chipotle Mexican Grill from 2013 to 2019. He is the brother of Elon Musk and Tosca Musk, son of Errol and Maye Musk, and a major shareholder in Tesla.
Michael Serbinis is a Canadian entrepreneur, engineer and angel investor based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Tosca Musk is a South African filmmaker. She is an executive producer and director of feature films, television programs, and web content. Her work includes K. Bromberg's Driven, Rachel van Dyken's Matchmaker's Playbook, and her web series, Tiki Bar TV. Tosca is the younger sister of Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk, and daughter of Errol Musk and Maye Musk. She co-founded the streaming service Passionflix.
Tesla Energy Operations, Inc. is the clean energy division of Tesla, Inc. that develops, manufactures, sells and installs photovoltaic solar energy generation systems, battery energy storage products and other related products and services to residential, commercial and industrial customers.
Maye Musk is a model and dietitian. She has been a model for 50 years, appearing on the covers of magazines, including a Time magazine health edition, Women's Day, international editions of Vogue, and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. She is the mother of Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk and Tosca Musk. She holds Canadian, South African, and American citizenship. She is a registered dietitian.
Tesla, Inc., an electric vehicle manufacturer and clean energy company founded in San Carlos, California in 2003 by American entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The company is named after Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla is the world's leading electric vehicle manufacturer, and, as of the end of 2021, Tesla's cumulative global vehicle sales totaled 2.3 million units.
Big Green is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2011 by Kimbal Musk and Hugo Matheson. They operated "The Kitchen restaurant group" believing that every child should have the opportunity to play, learn and grow in healthy communities.
TSLAQ is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on Twitter, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag, and Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer, in his book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019), establishes the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ in July 2018 to be the doxxing by a Twitter user of Lawrence Fossi, a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller who uses the pseudonym Montana Skeptic.
The Musk family is a wealthy family of South African origin that is largely active in the United States and Canada. The Musks are of English, Anglo-Canadian, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Swiss descent. The family is known for its entrepreneurial endeavours. Elon Musk was formerly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$232 billion as of December 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 28, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech.
In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested American aerospace company SpaceX to activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war. Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military. The satellite service has served for humanitarian purposes, as well as defense and attacks on Russian positions.
The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.
On December 15, 2022, Twitter suspended the accounts of ten journalists who have covered the company and its owner, Elon Musk. They included reporters Keith Olbermann, Steven L. Herman, and Donie O'Sullivan, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. Musk cited an incident between "a crazy stalker" and a car with his child as a justification for the suspensions. Posters on behalf of the owners of the accounts said that the suspensions were permanent. On December 16, 2022 Musk stated that account access would only be restricted for seven days and on December 17, 2022 some accounts were reportedly restored with Musk citing Twitter community polls as the reason for the reversal.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. Twitter was then rebranded to X in July 2023. Initially during Musk's tenure, Twitter introduced a series of reforms and management changes; the company reinstated a number of previously banned accounts, reduced the workforce by approximately 80%, closed one of Twitter's three data centers, and largely eliminated the content moderation team, replacing it with the crowd-sourced fact-checking system Community Notes.
One thing he claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true," Musk says. "He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.
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