Definitely, what was previously known as Twitter is going to stop being something like what we knew. Elon Musk has very different plans for X from what the microblogging social network used to be. The last of his ideas is to become a bank within a maximum of one year.
With the goal of consolidating X as the app for everything and with previous experience as one of the founders of PayPal, it seems that Twitter will be your new online bank.
X, your bank and every day that of more people
Elon Musk, owner of a general meeting where they said that the company needs some licenses for that and the condition will be fulfilled in the coming months. Meanwhile, the company is currently focused on obtaining money transmission licenses throughout the United States as part of its efforts to provide financial services.
This is yet another push by Musk to turn X into an “everything app,” like other popular WeChat services in China. “When I say payments, I actually mean a person’s entire financial life,” Musk said in a general call with X employees. “If it’s money, it will be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So it’s not just like sending 20 dollars to my friend. I’m talking about you not needing a bank account.”
A new PayPal
Said like this, and waiting for official announcements, it seems that what Elon Musk wants to do is a new PayPal and this is no coincidence. Musk has previous experience in the financial technology sector, as he was the founder of the company now known as PayPal Holdings Inc.
It even changed Twitter’s name to its dot-com boom-era online bank, X.com, which eventually became part of PayPal. It previously said the platform would offer high-yield money market accounts, debit cards, checking and lending services, with the goal of allowing users to “send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real time.”
«The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by David Sacks and I [Musk] in July 2000. For some reason PayPal, once part of eBay, not only didn’t implement the rest of the listing, 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 2000, 23 years ago.”
The billionaire had previously spoken of turning X into a financial center. In November 2022, meeting with Twitter employees for the first time, he said that “there is this transformative opportunity in payments.” However, Musk faces major challenges to get to that point. One of them is to convince people why they need such a platform. Getting them to trust X throughout their financial life is another.
