Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to turn X.com (formerly Twitter) into the ‘everything app’ and add transactions, similar toChina’s WeChat App and WeChat Pay. Yesterday he shared his vision with the company in an all hands meeting and The Verge accessed audio of the talk in which Musk says users will no longer need a bank.
“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,” said Musk. The target date for launching the offering is the end of 2024.
A year ago, during a Twitter spaces event shortly after acquiring the company, Musk first outlined his goal of enabling peer to peer payments and a money market fund. In a staff meeting the same week, he said if Twitter addresses all its users financial needs, “we will be the people’s financial institution.” He mentioned offering a high yield money market account, so “having a Twitter balance is the highest-yield thing that you can do.”
Musk was a PayPal co-founder and believes the current iteration of PayPal implemented a fraction of his gameplan.
Enabling payments means X.com needs licenses. So far, Twitter Payments has money transmitter licenses in nine states. That’s two new ones in the last couple of months.
A key question is around technology and whether it will use similar technology to PayPal or use blockchain? One also has to wonder about Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s views. He kept Square (Block) and Twitter separate, partly from an ethical point of view. Now Twitter will be used to launch a competitor to Square.
Meanwhile, banks have a dizzying array of competitors in the pipeline. Will stablecoins gain traction outside of crypto? Will consumers embrace CBDC? But the real question is how quickly banks can tokenize deposits. If they position themselves as the trusted wallet providers, then they should be the ones offering wallets with account balances, mortgages, money market funds, securities and more. But are they capable of moving fast enough?
