Britt Jones
Social media platform or a financial hub? Twitter might be both very soon.
X, formerly Twitter has been making a lot of changes since Elon Musk took over in 2022, but this new idea might be the most drastic.
When the SpaceX CEO bought out Twitter, we saw a quick restructure, mass layoffs, a subscription service and many users losing their verification ticks.
Now, there are plans to turn it into a bank.
Advert
Yep, that sounds about right.
According to The Verge, who was the first to hear an audio recording of Musk’s call to employees on Thursday (26 October), he shared his ideas about using the platform to offer financial services.
But it’s not the first time he has wanted to do this, as in his first meeting with Twitter employees, he expressed his interest in creating a financial platform.
He said in the audio recording: "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.”
"It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year."
This could be due to Musk's previous online banking company that merged with Confinity in 2000, which later became PayPal.
He continued in his meeting: “The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000.”
"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."
This means that maybe in the future, you’ll be able to apply for loans, savings accounts, debit cards and more when using the app or desktop version.
Or you could be able to send and receive money from other users, which has a lot of potential for selling products or services on the platform.
Recently, the CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino mentioned payment in a blog post, which might make their plans clearer.
She wrote: "We want money on X to flow as freely as information and conversation. We have already secured first money transmitter licenses in several states, and we are moving toward launching a global payment system – more soon.”
It may sound revolutionary, but Musk's ideas are actually already in practice regarding other apps and services.
For example, WeChat is a China-based social media platform that offers money transfers, payments, and other services alongside their messaging services.
But is it a good idea to implement so many new features to an app that’s allegedly already seeing their daily active users drop?
This comes after the paid subscription offering rolled out, forcing users to pay over £10 a month to have the same kind of privileges they could get for free through the previous verification service.
Not to mention that there have been talks of creating a subscription which requires payment to be able to write a post.
Whilst X claims that Premium subscribers are spending up to three times longer on the platform than non-subscribers, we’ll need to see the statistics on who’s actually signed up to Premium before making up our minds.