Twitter-formerly-X owner Elon Musk is, apparently, finally getting the “everything app” of his dreams — or is at least ordering his employees to build out his vision for one.
In the first all-hands meeting since renaming the company on Thursday, per audio acquired by The Verge, Musk told employees that he sees the app becoming a payment platform by the end of 2024.
“It would blow my mind,” the billionaire said, “if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year.”
X’s new-ish CEO Linda Yaccarino echoed Musk’s sentiments and said that she sees a “full opportunity” for Twitter payments in the next year, too. As The Verge notes, the meeting was the first time the CEO and owner have addressed employees and taken their questions in a formal setting together.
But whether Musk’s vision will end up coming to fruition in such a short timespan — let alone if enough people are willing to hand over their banking information to a company that’s billions of dollars in debt — remains to be seen.
And it’s not just basic banking information Musk wants from you.
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” the multi-hyphenate social network owner said. “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.”
To make that happen, Musk, who has apparently been working on this shift since the site was still called Twitter, said that he intends to secure the licensing to make money transfers within “the next few months.”
Notably, Musk didn’t address the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing investigation into Twitter’s privacy practices or the agency’s allegations that his ownership “may have jeopardized data privacy and security,” all of which could undermine the company’s efforts to get into your bank account.
In the same call, the X owner spoke to his longstanding desire for an “everything app,” and took it all the way back to his PayPal Mafia days — though to him, it was better known as X.com, his banking platform that he merged with PayPal.
“The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000,” Musk told what remains of his staff. “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.”
He didn’t add one important piece of context to that curious little story: that after he merged his banking site, X.com, with Peter Thiel’s PayPal-owning company Confinity, he was ousted as CEO after trying to shift the branding away from the PayPal name and towards the letter X.
After his dismissal, PayPal has become an immensely successful fintech company.
More on X: Twitter Use Has Absolutely Plummeted Since Elon Musk Took Over
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