History of the Tesla Dot Com Website in Pictures

by Fred Fuld III

Have you ever wondered what the old websites look like for various companies? The Tesla.com website has had a few dramatic changes over the years, because for a long time, the domain name wasn’t even owned by Elon Musk’s Tesla (TSLA) company.

The following shows what the old home pages looked like for Tesla.com:

Tesla Year: 2002

TESLA.COM 2002

Tesla Year: 2008

Tesla.com 2008

Tesla Year: 2010

Tesla.com 2010

Tesla Year: 2013

Tesla.com 2013

Tesla Year: 2016

Tesla.com 2016

Tesla Year: 2017

Tesla.com 2017

Tesla Year: 2021

Tesla.com 2021

Screenshots are courtesy of the WaybackMachine.

Disclosure: Author owns TSLA

Who Owns the One Letter Domain Names?

by Fred Fuld III

Domain names have become a hot investment over the last 20 years, with several selling for over a million dollars. In case you are not familiar with them, domain names are, in very simple terms, the website address. For example apple.com, facebook.com, and google.com are all domain names. The most common ones end in .com but some end in .net, .org. .biz, .co, and other top level domains.

Did you ever wonder who owns a.com, b.com, or c.com. There are only twenty six letter domains that are even possible, but getting those one letter domains is even more difficult to get than one letter stock ticker symbols.

To start with, the dot com letters ‘a’ through ‘p’, ‘r’ through ‘w’, and the letter ‘y’ are all controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, also known as the IANA, the organization which oversees the allocation of IP addresses and domain names.

In case you were wondering about the zero dot com through 9.com domains, they are controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Some companies were lucky enough to register one letter dot com domains before December 1, 1993 (or buy them from someone who registered them by that date), as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority put a restriction on single character domains at that time.

But there are still a few that are owned by companies.

a.co is owned by Amazon (AMZN).

g.co is owned by Google (GOOG)

s.co is owned by Snapchat (SNAP)

o.co and o.info are both owned by Overstock.com (OSTK).

0.co (that’s a zero dot co) is owned by Overstock.com (OSTK).

0.info (that’s a zero dot info) is also owned by Overstock.com (OSTK).

q.com is being used by Quantum Fiber.

t.co is owned by Twitter (TWTR).

x.com has been owned by x.commerce, which was developed by eBay (EBAY). Current ownership shows up as being private.

x.co has been owned by GoDaddy to be used as a URL shortener..

y.co is owned by XBN Ltd., formerly YCO Group, a luxury yacht company, which is a subsidiary of Fifty Four Four Ltd..

z.com used to be owned by Nissan North America Inc., which is owned by Nissan Motor (NSANY), which trades on NASDAQ. It is now owned by GMO Internet, Inc. (GMOYF), a Japan based Internet services company which trades on the Tokyo exchange and the US OTC Market.

i.net is owned by Future Media Architects, a privately held company based in the British Virgin Islands.

c.tv, h.tv, k.tv, l.tv, o.tv, q.tv, s.tv, t.tv, w.tv, y.tv, and z.tv are also owned by Future Media Architects.

d.tv has been owned by Worldwide Media, Inc. publisher of  TheDomains.com.

u.tv is owned by ITV plc (ITVPY), a British media company. The company trades on the London Stock Exchange and the US OTC Market.

Want to know what companies have one letter stock ticker symbols? Here they are:

Agilent Technologies Inc. (A)

Barnes Group Inc. (B)

Citigroup, Inc. (C) formerly the symbol for Chrysler

Dominion Energy, Inc. (D)

Eni SpA (E)

Ford Motor Co. (F)

Genpact Ltd. (G) formerly the symbol for Gillette

Hyatt Hotels (H)

Jacobs Engineering (J)

Kellogg Company (K)

Loews Corporation (L)

Macy’s, Inc. (M)

Realty Income Corp. (O)

Ryder System, Inc. (R)

SentinelOne (S) formerly the symbol for Sprint Nextel Corp. and formerly the symbol for Sears Roebuck

AT&T, Inc. (T)

Unity Software (U)

Visa, Inc. (V)

Wayfair (W)

United States Steel Corp. (X)

Alleghany Corp. (Y)

Zillow (Z) formerly the symbol for Woolworth, now known as Foot Locker (FL)

 

Crypto Domain Names Being Auctioned

by Fred Fuld III

SEDO, one of the leading companies involved in buying, parking, and selling domains, is currently auctioning a group of cryptocurrency domains.

Some of the domain names being offered include the following:

tokens.org

cryptobanks.com

coin.club

bitcoin.fund

bitcoins.shop

tokensinfo.com

The auction ends in about six days.

Have You Considered Investing in Domain Hacks?

What is a domain hack, you might ask? First, as you may already know, a domain name is the name of a website, such as google.com, wikipedia.org, or att.net. The letters to the right of the dot are called top level domains [TLDs], not just com, org, and net, but also the country codes, such as .ca for Canada and .mx for Mexico.

Now let’s talk about the hacks. A hack involves combining letters to then left of the dot with a top level domain to the right to make a word.

For example, dub.ai combines the letters “dub” with “.ai”, the TLD for Anguilla, and ends up spelling Dubai.

Currently, Sedo, the major domain buying and selling site, is holding an auction of domain hacks.

There are several business and finance related domain hacks that are up for sale, such as meeti.ng (.ng is the TLD for Nigeria) and de.al (.al is the TLD for Albania).

Here are some others:

freewi.fi

antivir.us

ti.ps

go.al

cloudcomputi.ng

technic.al

gambli.ng

upsal.es

hybridca.rs

financi.al

aphrodisi.ac

biddi.ng

websit.es

manufacture.rs

royalti.es

economi.es

onlinecasi.no

residenti.al

retir.es

technologic.al

capit.al

selli.ng

salari.es

 

You Can Now Register and Buy Cryptocurrency Ethereum Domain Names

A domain name is is a website address, such as google.com or wikipedia.org. The letters that you see after the dot refer to the top level domain.

Now for those who are interested in the Ethereum cryptocurrency, an ETH domain is now available.

As an example, some of the Dot ETH domains that are currently available for bidding and sale on Sedo include the following:

casinos.eth

banking.eth

wallets.eth

converter.eth

economics.eth

bitcoin.eth

There are hundreds of other ETH domains currently on the list.

If you want to register your own ETH domain name, you can go to ens.domains

 

Why Did Donald Trump Register the DonaldTrumpSucks.com Domain Name?

Based on an article that originally appeared at Stockerblog.com on August 19, 2015

A domain name is, in simple terms, the address for a website. For example, Apple.com, Google.com, and Yahoo.com are all domain names. Domain names are often referred to as URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) or website addresses. Usually, it is what comes after the http:// or the https://, and sometimes you see a www thrown in there.

Some people actually register domain names as investments, which for the right name, can pay off handsomely. For example, whoever originally registered fb.com, eventually got lucky and sold out to Facebook (FB) for $8.5 million. The person who owned loans.com sold to Bank of America (BAC) for $3 million, with mortgage.com going to Citigroup (C) for $1.8 million. There are many other high priced domain sales that can be found in the Stock Market Trivia book.

Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, owns the DonaldTrump.com domain of course. Well technically, the registration shows the ownership as the General Counsel of The Trump Organization, originally registered back on March 7, 1999. It is registered through GoDaddy (GDDY).

But when I checked out the owner of DonaldTrumpSucks.com back in 2015, I expected that it might have been registered by a Republican opponent of Donald Trump or possibly someone on the Democratic side. Yet it turns out that this domain is also owned by The Trump Organization.

DonaldTrumpSucks domain 1

When checking again today, it shows the same thing.
DonaldTrumpSucks domain 2
What is interesting is that this particular domain was registered on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014.   Was that the day that Trump really decided to run? This domain was registered through GoDaddy.
Trump’s company has registered over 3,000 domain names, and according to an article by the International Business Times, the organization buys tens of thousands of domains every year.
Some of these purchases are for legitimate purchases, although currently the pages don’t appear to be live. For example:

trumpequities.com
donaldtrumpbriefcases.com
thetrumpexperience.com
trumpwatches.com

Trump isn’t buying all of them them for investment though. Apparently, many are purchased for guarding against “predators.” Here are some of the domains acquired by Trump:

trumpnetworkmarketingsucks.com
trumpnetworksucks.com
trumpcorporationsucks.com
trumporganizationsucks.com
trumpnetworkfraud.com
trumpnetworkponzischeme.com

All of the above point to a generic GoDaddy web page. However, it is interesting to note that if you go to TrumpSucks.com, it brings you to The Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The owner of TrumpSucks is unknown as it  is privately registered through Domain Privacy Service.

The problem with acquiring the anti-Trump domain names is that there are thousands variances of domain names that people can come up with. One example, that I would rather not put in writing but begins with an F is owned by an individual who apparently has had it registered since 2004. For that matter, another domain, which has as its last part, a four letter word that begins with the letter S is also owned by an individual, and was registered a few years ago. Neither of these domains have developed web sites.

But even without the dirty words, there are other top level domains such as .net and .org that could be used with the anti-Trump words, As a matter of fact, an individual just registered donaldtrumpsucks.net in August 2015. And donaldtrumpsucks.org was registered exactly one month ago. Both with the registrar of, who else, GoDaddy, and neither of which are developed.

I’m not sure what the intent of these individuals are. Maybe they think they can resell their domains to the Trump Organization. Have fun dealing with the Trump lawyers.

But is there an investment angle to this, other than trying to find a good (bad) domain to resell to Trump? The one investment that sticks out is GoDaddy, due to its popularity as a domain registrar. Potential investors should be aware that the stock trades at nosebleed high price earnings and forward P/E ratios.

It will be interesting to see how the Trump domain activity plays out. If anyone has any ideas on an investment angle to the Trump domains, please post in the comment section below.

Disclosure: Author didn’t own any of the above at the time the article was written.

Investment Related Domain Name Auction Ends Soon

Have you ever wanted a great domain name for your business or web site that is related to the stock market or investments? With the new top level domains, such a broker and trading, some interesting options are available.

Sedo and BostonIvy are holding an exclusive online auction right now. Some have reserve ranges of $500 to $999 with no bids yet as of this writing.

Here are a few examples:

  • housing.markets
  • oil.trading
  • dollar.trading
  • forex.trading
  • auto.broker
  • asset.broker
  • investment.broker
  • currency.forex
  • dealer.forex
  • oil.broker
  • diamond.broker
  • e.broker

The Auction ends Nov. 3 at 12pm (noon) EST. For more information, and to see a list of domains for sale, go to:

Bostonivy.auction