U.S. Steel Had the Stock Ticker Symbol ‘X’ For a Century. Who Gets It Now?

U.S. Steel has been acquired. That raises the inevitable question: Who gets the X?

The deal, which makes the American company part of Nippon Steel, has closed, the companies confirmed Wednesday. The merger is significant for plenty of reasons, among them the protracted “will it happen or won’t it” soap opera that culminated in President Donald Trump’s approval of the deal and the creation of a “golden share” that gives the U.S. government a range of rights regarding the company’s future.

But there’s a less significant, but nevertheless interesting, aspect of the deal: The company traded on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker “X,” making it one of six single-letter symbols now not in use. (The others are I, N, P, Q and Y.) Now that symbol is available for the first time in more than a century.

Meanwhile, the other 20 single-letter stocks chug along. Some are widely, or at least reasonably, known, with Citigroup (C), Ford (F) and Macy’s (M) among them. Others, like Jacobs Solutions (J) and Realty Income (O), are perhaps more obscure. 

Will someone claim the X? The NYSE declined to comment on the specific case, but it requires a formal request, made through its website, along with “a reasonable basis to believe that the symbol will be used within 24 months.”Tickers that return to exchanges undergo a “cooling off” period of at least 90 days to avoid potential confusion. 

As for candidates to take on the symbol: There are perhaps-obvious candidates in xAI, the artificial intelligence and social-media company run by Elon Musk, or even perhaps SpaceX, another company he controls. (Musk has a son named “X” and runs an EV maker, Tesla, that sells a Model X but already uses “TSLA.”) 

SpaceX and xAI, however, haven’t disclosed plans to list shares in the near future; representatives of both companies, as well as Tesla, didn’t respond to Investopedia’s request for comment in time for publication. 

For now, it seems, X remains unknown. 

This article has been updated since it was first published to add more information about the NYSE’s process.