The 27-Year Grudge That Could Make You Rich

In September 1999, Elon Musk boarded a plane in San Francisco for the longest flight of his life.

He was headed to Sydney, Australia. Honeymoon trip with his new wife. His company, x.com — the digital bank he’d been building for years — had just crossed 200,000 users in two months. Things couldn’t have been better.

Fourteen hours later, his plane landed in Sydney.

By then, he no longer ran his company.

While Elon was somewhere over the Pacific, his co-founders called an emergency board meeting. They removed him as CEO. Renamed the company. Eventually sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion — and it became the thing you know as PayPal.

Peter Thiel, one of the people who orchestrated the coup, walked away with $55 million.

Elon walked away with a lesson he’s carried for 27 years.


RELATED: I paid $5,000 to hear Elon say this

I recently paid $5,000 to be in a room with Elon Musk in Los Angeles. And what he said in that room, confirmed everything my 15+ years in the tech industry had been telling me. I believe what Elon is launching right now — a project 27 years in the making — could be his biggest move yet. If you buy just one stock in 2026, I urge you to make it the one I’m giving away for free here.


The Grudge

The reason I’m telling you this story is because nothing Elon Musk has done since 1999 — not Tesla, not SpaceX, not xAI — has been accidental.

It has all been in service of one goal.

Getting back what was taken from him on that flight to Sydney.

In 2022, he spent $44 billion on Twitter. The press called it impulsive. Overpriced. A vanity purchase.

They were wrong.

Elon didn’t buy Twitter because he wanted a social media company. He bought it because he needed a platform — a platform with hundreds of millions of users already attached — to build what x.com was always supposed to be.

A complete financial operating system.

He’s calling it X Money.

And in March 2026, it started going live.

What X Money Actually Is

Let me give you the short version first, and then I’ll tell you why it matters to you as an investor.

X Money is embedded directly into the X app. It launched in limited external beta in March 2026 and is now in a broader public rollout across the United States.

Here’s what it already does:

It offers a 6% annual yield on deposits — compared to the 0.01% the average American earns at a traditional bank. If you have $150,000 sitting in a Chase savings account right now, you’re earning roughly $15 a year. X Money would pay you $9,000.


Don’t Buy the OpenAI IPO Without Seeing This

In the biggest tech IPOs of the last 20 years — Facebook, Uber, Snap — the IPO buyers left the real money on the table. A different group of investors made massive gains. Find out how to get on the right side of this huge IPO.

See the facts for yourself here.


It comes with a black metal Visa debit card with FDIC insurance up to $250,000. It offers instant peer-to-peer transfers. It was built in partnership with Cross River Bank and has money-transfer licenses in 43 states, including California, Texas, and Florida.

And Elon is just getting started.

The vision isn’t a savings account. The vision is an everything app — the entire financial life of 600 million users, all inside one platform. Payments. Investing. Insurance. Lending. The full $480 trillion in global financial flows, running through X.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, was asked about this threat directly. He said his bank is “scared shitless.”

I think he has good reason to be.

The People Who Get Rich Are Never the Obvious Ones

Here’s where most investors make a mistake.

When they hear a story like this, they start asking: how do I buy X? How do I buy Elon’s stake in the financial system?

You can’t. X is private.

But I’ve watched Elon operate long enough to know that the real money is rarely made by buying the thing everyone is talking about. It’s made by understanding who he needs to get there — and getting behind those companies first.

Go back through Elon’s track record. Every time he launches something, the companies that supply him move first.

Jensen Huang personally hand-delivered Nvidia’s first AI computer to Elon at OpenAI. By the time Elon and the AI industry made Nvidia indispensable, the stock went from $15 to over $800 — more than 5,000%.

Modine Manufacturing made a battery cooling deal with Tesla in 2012. Almost nobody noticed. The stock went from $14 to $242. A 1,700% gain.

Carpenter Technology supplied the superalloys SpaceX needs to survive reentry. It went up 1,000% in three years.

CATL, which makes Tesla’s batteries, returned 330% in five months after inking the deal.

Every time. Same pattern.

So when I look at X Money, I’m not asking how to buy X. I’m asking: who does Elon need to make X Money work at scale?

The answer is straightforward. Payment infrastructure. Visa architecture. Banking rails. Financial data security. The companies that build the physical and digital backbone of a new financial operating system.

That’s where the partner stock opportunity is — and it’s not fully priced in yet, because most of Wall Street is still busy staring at the SpaceX IPO rumor mill.


RELATED: SpaceX is offering you shares. Don’t take them.


The Ticker I’ll Give You Today

I don’t want to leave you without something concrete.

There is one publicly traded vehicle that gives you direct exposure to Elon’s broader tech ecosystem right now — including SpaceX, which remains the most anticipated IPO on the planet.

It’s called the Tema Space Innovators ETF.

The ticker is NASA.

As of this week, it’s trading at $31.26 per share.

Tema holds over 1.35 million SpaceX share equivalents, valued at approximately $182 million — implying a SpaceX market cap of roughly $1.6 trillion. That’s more than Apple’s current market value.

I want to be clear about what NASA is and isn’t. It’s an ETF, not a single stock. It holds a basket of space and technology companies, with SpaceX as a significant anchor. It’s a diversified way to get exposure to what Elon is building without betting everything on a single name.

It is not, by itself, a pure X Money play. The X Money partner stocks — the specific infrastructure companies Elon will need to scale his financial platform — are a separate thesis I’m continuing to research.

But for a reader who wants a first step into this story today, at a reasonable price, with real SpaceX exposure behind it — NASA is a legitimate place to start.

What I’d Do

The pattern here is familiar. A platform at 600 million users. A 6% yield that makes traditional banks look embarrassing. A founder who has done this exact thing before and has spent 27 years preparing for round two.

The X Money rollout is not a future event. It’s happening right now.

When the average American realizes their savings account is paying them $15 a year while a free app pays them $9,000 — the migration will not be gradual.

Get positioned before that moment arrives.

Ticker: NASA — Tema Space Innovators ETF, $31.26 as of June 10, 2026.


Wall Street Watchdogs is committed to uncovering the truth about financial markets and helping individual investors prepare for systemic risks that mainstream media won’t discuss. We receive no compensation from the companies or assets we analyze. This article is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice.


NEXT: I paid $5,000 to hear Elon say this

I recently paid $5,000 to be in a room with Elon Musk in Los Angeles. And what he said in that room, confirmed everything my 15+ years in the tech industry had been telling me. I believe what Elon is launching right now — a project 27 years in the making — could be his biggest move yet. If you buy just one stock in 2026, I urge you to make it the one I’m giving away for free here.



NEXT: