On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a new product called Dots, an always-on AI agent with a cheerful, fuzzy avatar. The colorful avatars may evoke smiles, but the biggest laugh at launch (we imagine) was Elon Musk, the former OpenAI founder who left the company to start a competitor, Grok, and lost a lawsuit.
This is because the domain “dot.com” belongs to Musk’s xAI and now redirects to the download page for xAI’s Grok chatbot app. According to the Whois Domain Owners Registry, the domain name was just transferred in July.
It’s entirely possible that xAI purchased the domain for normal domain purchasing reasons. “Dot” might be a typo for “bot”, so I grabbed that to get the mistyped search. We contacted xAI and asked. However, xAI does not own the name “bot.com” or any other obvious typographical domains like “vot.com” which is up for sale.
The internet theory is much crazier. The idea is that Musk (or his team) carried out the prank, heard about OpenAI’s new product and its name, and bought the domain name.
In fact, anonymous X user and xAI watcher @birdabo (who calls himself “Fuck Poster @SpaceXAI”) was the first to discover the domain name of the now-viral post. Whatever the motive, the situation is interesting.
And as for the “dots.com” domain, which more directly applies to product names, it now belongs to a long-defunct company. So if petty revenge pranks are truly the motive, earning that name would also be next level.
