Illustration: The Verge
Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money. He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all-hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “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.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the company sees this becoming a “full opportunity” in 2024. “It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said.
The company is currently working on locking down money transmission licenses across the US so that it can offer financial services. Musk told employees Thursday that he hopes to get the others X needs in “the next few months.”
Musk has discussed his plans to turn X into a financial hub before. He even renamed Twitter after his dot-com-boom-era online bank, X.com, which eventually became part of PayPal. He previously said the platform would offer high-yield money market accounts, debit cards, checks, and loan services, with the goal of letting users “send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real-time.”
The original plan for X.com is clearly on Musk’s mind. “The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000,” Musk said on Thursday’s internal X call. “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.”
Turning X into a rich hub for financial services ties directly into Musk’s goal of making the platform into an “everything app,” akin to super apps like WeChat in China that offer access to shopping, transportation, and more.
Musk faces major challenges to get there, though. Convincing people why they need such a platform is one. Getting them to trust X with their entire financial life is another.
