The platform appears to be shrinking under Musk’s leadership, according to third-party traffic data. He has alienated advertisers with his reactionary and conspiratorial political opinions, sent the company deep into debt, and, at times, rendered the platform unusable by limiting how many tweets users can see. Perhaps this would give his super-app idea some credibility, if not for Musk having spent the past 15 months blundering through his latest business venture in full view of the public. He founded an online bank-also called X.com-in 1999, and it shortly thereafter merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Musk does have experience in the payments business. Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside The bad news is that the person Musk tasked with spearheading the project was laid off-along with about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce. According to the Financial Times, the company began filing applications for those licenses early this year and has been at work building parts of a payment infrastructure. To do that, X would need to build out an advanced, secure payment platform apply the appropriate regulatory licenses to legally process payments and store money and, of course, recruit businesses and financial institutions to use the platform. And if he could manage to get hundreds of millions of people to live and shop and bank on his app, instead of, say, shitpost memes and argue politics with white nationalists, that would be an immense success. Musk has already launched a program to share ad revenue with some of Twitter’s larger “creator” accounts, the early beneficiaries of which included many prominent right-wing shock jocks. X, the theoretical everything app, could streamline and consolidate these exchanges, and, like WeChat, generate revenue from them. Many of these people use various “link in bio” pages to direct people to their work and receive payment. Plenty of people across Twitter-influencers, freelancers, small-business owners-use the platform to sell things. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.” You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. “And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. “There’s no WeChat movement outside of China,” he said. In a leaked recording of a Twitter town hall back in June 2022, Musk hinted that China’s WeChat was a model of sorts for X. Think of it as the internet, but without leaving Musk’s walled garden. In a tweet last October, he declared that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Versions of these “ super apps” already exist and are popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so we know what this means: X would function as a holistic platform that includes payment processing and banking, ride-sharing, news, communication with friends, and loads and loads of commerce. The first theory requires taking Musk’s ambitions somewhat seriously. Musk wants to build the “Internet of Elon.” I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.” (Even with its new name, the site is pretty much the same as ever the blue bird logo in the left-hand corner of the website is now a black X, and … that’s about it.) This X boondoggle may simply be the flailing of a man who doesn’t want to own his social network and was pressured via lawsuit to buy it, but Musk and the Twitter (X?) CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would like you to believe that much bigger things are coming.ġ. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. Eight months after the billionaire’s takeover, Twitter changed the prompt ever so slightly to match the puzzling, chaotic nature of the platform under the new regime: “What’s happening?” became “What is happening?!” For years, the prompt in the text box at the top of the page read, “What’s happening?,” a friendly invitation for users to share their thoughts. In May, Elon Musk presided over an uncharacteristically subtle tweak to Twitter’s home page.
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