Elon Musk is still working towards his dream of building a "super app" with X (formerly Twitter) since he purchased the company late last year.
Now, according to an internal recording obtained by The Verge, Musk wants X to be the go-to financial app in an year. In the meeting, Musk said he wants X to be the center of all things money related and that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”
When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life. If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.
Furthermore, it looks like X"s CEO Linda Yaccarino is also onboard with her saying she sees it become a “full opportunity” next year. Elon Musk, on the other hand, has set some tight deadlines for the feature rollout, with the billionaire saying "it would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year”.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Elon Musk"s X had obtained money or currency transmitter licenses in seven US states. The license allows X to facilitate wire and electronic transfers.
This is of course not the first time that Musk is working on a financial services platform. Musk along with others launched X.com roughly two decades ago. X was later rebranded to PayPal and sold off to eBay at a hefty price. Musk, however, still believes in the same idea and plans to use the playbook he wrote for PayPal to defeat PayPal with X.
The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000. And for some reason PayPal, once it became eBay, not only did they not implement the rest of the list, but they actually rolled back a bunch of key features, which is crazy. So PayPal is actually a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago.
X would not be the first app to bundle a host of services into one app. In China, WeChat follows a similar plan with multiple services including finance bundled into one app. X, however, will not be restricted to one country or region as Musk plans to provide a way instantly send or receive money worldwide.