Pecohub When Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter two years ago, he said his goal was to turn the platform into two things: the “digital town square” and the “everything app.” He has failed at both goals.
X isn’t something that is upsetting “the far right and the far left equally,” Instead, it has become Musk’s political weapon. In fact, he may be so preoccupied with trying to get Donald Trump elected that he has forgotten that X was supposed to be a bank by now.
After his disruption of the automotive and space industries, bankers are on notice that Musk has them in his sights – just like former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, who has spent years building a banking app in the form of Block’s Cash App.
In a briefing with X staff last Thursday, leaked to US tech publication The Verge, Musk said X had applied for various money transmission licences in the United States to allow it to send payments.
He’s also keen for X to offer an interest-bearing money market account, debit cards and loans. Indeed, he said he wants the platform – which he bought for $US44 billion last year and which has more than 300 million active users – to serve “someone’s entire financial life”.
“If it involves money, it’ll be on our platform,” Musk told his workers last week. “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…. It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out soon.”
