Elon Musk inches closer to turning X into a super-app
Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk wants to turn X into a super-app for your social networking, private messaging, news, shopping, and banking. In China, WeChat is a super-app, and Musk has spoken publicly about replicating that model with X in other countries.
Kurt Wagner for Bloomberg News:
Payments are at the center of this everything app idea. If you can’t send or spend money on X, you won’t be able to do everything. In fact, you won’t be able to do a lot of things.
Musk knows this, of course, which is why he’s building a payments product inside X… We used public records requests to obtain hundreds of documents about X’s money transmitter license applications in all 50 US states.
Those documents offered a glimpse of what is to come: a Venmo-like payments feature that will let users store money on their X accounts for easy purchases and peer-to-peer transfers. Musk has even talked about offering an “extremely high yield” on balances to encourage people to leave money in their X account.
X has received payments licenses in 28 states so far, with plans to expand internationally shortly after getting up and running in the US. By the time people eventually start sending money to their friends through X, it will have been a multiyear effort.
The reality, though, is that navigating the technical complexity and regulatory red tape is going to be the easy part. The real challenge will be convincing the world that X is now a bank.
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