Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank (From The Verge) [2 Articles]
~ Sunday, October 29, 2023 Blog Post ~
By Jacob Kastrenakes and Alex Heath, October 27, 2023
‘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.’
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.
Musk wants to beat PayPal with the PayPal playbook he wrote two decades ago
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.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23934216/x-twitter-bank-elon-musk-2024
Article 2: Shock Leak Reveals Elon Musk’s ‘Mind-Blowing’ X Plan To Replace Banks And PayPal — Sparking Wild ‘Critical Mass’ Bitcoin And Crypto Price Speculation (From Forbes)
By Billy Bambrough, October 28, 2023
Elon Musk, the TeslaTSLA +0.7% billionaire who took the social media company Twitter private last year and rebranded it X, has outlined his grand plan for the platform at an “all-hands” virtual meeting.
The details of the call, leaked to The Verge, include plans to grow X’s financial services arm to rival banks and PayPalPYPL -2.6%, described by Musk as “mind-blowing” if it’s not rolled out by the end of 2024.
Following the call being leaked, prominent voices in the bitcoin and crypto space called the plan something that could spur a “critical mass” of crypto adoption, potentially mirroring PayPal’s bitcoin adoption in late 2020 that triggered the last bitcoin price bull run.
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk reportedly said on the anniversary of his takeover of the company, adding people will be surprised “just how powerful it is.”
“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.”
Speculation has swirled since Musk first made a bid for Twitter in early 2022 that he could add significant payment, financial and banking features to the platform, with leaked text between Musk and his brother Kimbal revealing he considered using bitcoin’s blockchain technology.
Since then, he’s acquired money transmitter licenses for X in various U.S. states while a leak suggested Musk could turn X (Twitter) into an “updated version of PayPal.”
However, Musk denied media reports that said X could add a trading platform built inside the app as part of a plan to turn the app into a financial-data giant, with Musk going on to say X will never launch a cryptocurrency of its own to rival bitcoin, ethereum, XRPXRP 0.0%XRP 0.0% or Musk’s “fave” cryptocurrency dogecoin.
“Just in time for the sovereign debt crisis,” tech investor and former CoinbaseCOIN -5.1% chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan posted to X, referring to the ballooning U.S. debt pile that increased dramatically over the last few years.
Srinivasan made headlines earlier this year when he made a bet the bitcoin price would sky-rocket to $1 million per bitcoin by July due to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive tightening program in the wake of its ultra-loose monetary policy during the Covid pandemic. Some feared this would trigger a global financial meltdown and the collapse of the established financial system.
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