“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.”

Well that sounds terrifying!

424 points
*

Just wait till Musk learns about banking regulations.
He’s already complaining about the EU regulations on social media, but they nothing compared to what banks have to deal with.

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134 points

He’s recreating Venmo. 😂

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96 points

FWIW his white whale or inspiration is more like the Chinese “we do everything” apps / platforms https://wise.com/us/blog/chinese-payment-app

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69 points

Without getting official government institutions on board or making the app mandatory in some way, I don’t see how this would work outside of authoritarian countries

They’re bleeding users and advertisers as it is

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33 points
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The thing about these everything apps is that they filled a niche in the markets they’ve succeeded in. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, Google doesn’t operate their Play services or Google Pay in China, meaning there was a vacuum for something else to fill it. WeChat and AliPay has done that.

It’d take a LOT of effort to build a platform like Paytm for the U.S., nevermind other markets. You can’t just buy a microblogging platform and magically redevelop it into something like Paytm. He’d need to partner with other businesses and whatnot, and I just don’t see there being any sort of interest in that kind of partnership.

There’s been attempts to build these sorts of “everything apps” before. Facebook has tried and failed. I think Snapchat has tried it. Apps here in the west tend to focus on doing a single or a handful of tasks really well. If an app ends up doing too much, it’s often split into several apps.

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15 points

He was involved with PayPal so it’s not a huge stretch but I wouldn’t trust anything with that clown.

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1 point

Which are basically operating systems, and therefore not needed and against the rules of the iOS and Android app stores.

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1 point

Yeh was going to say this sounds more like wechat.

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8 points
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Deleted by creator
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24 points

And let’s remind everyone because people seem to forget.

PayPal is NOT FDIC insured!

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13 points

Was forced out of after he almost tanked the company trying to do this exact thing.

What’s the definition of insanity again?

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1 point

Yeah, it’s not an original idea. He’s recycling his ideas.

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3 points

ExTwitter

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9 points
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That is too simplistic of a name and un-original.

If this product moves forward, it’s likely to be on a small scale. For example, like when a person needs to send a friend reimbursement for a coffee. So, initially, if it needs a simple name for paying back friends, or other pals, why not just call it Pay-A-Pal, or PayPal for short.

No bank account, no actual cash and everything happens in the system. It’s revolutionary! It’s like digital transactions that happen through pure accounting for a small fee. Like credit cards, but those are old.

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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67 points

This will almost definitely have a large “crypto” aspect. Which means the business model starts at unregulated fraud and gets worse from there.

But yeah, I assume there is a whiteboard at twitter headquarters, smeared with feces, that has

  1. Become bank
  2. Too big to fail
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22 points
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Somehow services like PayPal manage to avoid being regulated like a bank. I’m sure they’ll clobber cobble together some potentially unlawful solution and not face any repercussions for it.

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28 points

Paypal is a bank here in europe. Hope musXk leaves Europe.

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25 points

iirc the money storage aspect of PayPal has to be regulated as a bank.

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12 points

I think because they’re a payment processor. Banks store large amounts of money, make loans, etc.

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18 points

It’s going to be like a crypto or PayPal wallet where you can store a balance, it’s just not insured or regulated like a bank.

I saw an article a while ago where a concerning amount of people were doing that instead of a bank account.

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3 points

They issue credit and lenders finance this. There’s always a bank.

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10 points

Cobble?

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6 points

The Things been put in charge of their legal team.

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4 points

Yes, jesus thank you. It was right on the tip of my tongue.

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-2 points

“Clobber” implies violence, which is somehow even less elegant than the standard phrase that the haphazard “cobble” implies. Given the shitshow of X so far, clobber probably works better even if it’s not the usual way to phrase this at all.

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20 points
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Even if he complies to all the regs. There is no way people in the west will switch to his app. The reason why those all-in-one apps took off in China and Southeast Asia is because banking infrastructure sucked hard before. You could only pay cash in most places unless you went to more upscale stores. Because those payment terminals are just too expensive for many small time businesses. With the arrival of those apps even a street vendor could afford to accept digital payments. Thus lots of people started using those apps to pay. The western countries already have good banking infrastructure and people are very hesitant to switch banks.

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12 points

people are very hesitant to switch banks.

Wells Fargo still existing is pretty good evidence

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15 points

I think it’s plausible he will actually pull X out of the EU completely and concentrate on the US. Banking regulations around the world vary greatly and I can’t see him wanting to handle all that.

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6 points

Wanting or able to handle it?

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5 points

Yes

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5 points

Paypal was built on the idea of a system that was without regulations that were tough. Paypal in the UK operated out of Ireland up until recently out of FCA control knowing full well they were committing fraud on a grand scale with things like “We’re closing your account and if you want your money back get in contact with us in 180days time” which was the email people used to get when the system didnt like you for any reason.

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3 points

Yeah, getting the licences involves a ton of audits, compliance to a bunch of regulations, etc. All stuff Twitter has no experience with.

It would literally be easier to just start this thing from scratch instead of grafting it onto a social network.

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2 points

Best he will do is another paypal/venmo thing. No way its gonna be a bank.

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3 points

I mean, he wanted Paypal originally (and to name it X), so this just seems like the end goal he was trying to get to the whole time.

And it will still crash and burn. Gloriously so.

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0 points

I wouldn’t trust this trust fund mafioso with a plastic spoon, let alone banking credentials.

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-7 points

Wait until you find out he founded Paypal, which was called X.com at the time

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17 points

He didn’t found paypal (or x.com for that matter) but he was CEO (?) of X when it acquired paypal, which promptly ousted him for trying to rebrand paypal to X despite the former already have massive brand recognition thanks to its exclusive partnership with eBay.

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-49 points

Well he made PayPal.

So he probably knows a thing or two about the financial sector.

Maybe he’ll integrate PayPal into X

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35 points

He didn’t though.

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32 points
*

Don’t believe all the bullshit about what he has “created”. He was fired, but got to keep is equity. Peter Thiel was the PayPal founder.

Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2008.

For a long while, Elon was very successful and very popular. Like most CEOs, he claimed all the work at Tesla and SpaceX is of his own creation. And sure, I am sure he was responsible for a lot of the financial success of those two companies. He sets goals for a company and the people in those companies try to achieve those goals. In Elon’s case, he sets many goals and many projections that tend to fall flat. That doesn’t matter if you are successful in getting more investors and boost stock prices.

However, once he started running his mouth on Twitter, it became very clear that his charisma couldn’t keep up.

Also, the financial sector is nothing like it was when PayPal was founded. There weren’t regulations in place that could apply directly to that kind of company yet. While he may know more about the financial sector simply because he deals with many more zeros on a daily basis, his “revolutionary” description of how he wants to transform X shows that he is way out of touch.

Quite simply, Elon has proven that he cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to reporting anything financial. For example, him and the “CEO” of X are currently saying that advertisers are returning at record rates. This is getting proven wrong, or being shown as misleading at best.

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12 points

Nope, PayPal bought his x.com company and fired him as the CEO.

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11 points
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Deleted by creator
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9 points

He didn’t make paypal. Not even a founder.

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8 points

Wasn’t his company bought out by PayPal?

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5 points

No another fascist created PayPal.

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4 points

He didn’t though. He failed to make X, got booted out for being insufferable, then the company he owned equity in bought and sold PayPal

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167 points

I’d rather let a crack addict manage my money than let Musky any near it.

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28 points

I’d rather let a crack addict manage my balls than let Musk anywhere near my money.

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16 points
*

I’d rather let an addict manage to crack my balls than let Musk anywhere near my money.

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3 points

Especially if he “manages” money the way he “manages” companies!

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140 points
*

Is it possible to remain subscribed to Technology but not get posts about this person?

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40 points

Remember when the reddit technology sub banned articles about tesla? Good times.

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29 points

Depending on your client you can likely filter or block specific users and phrases.

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13 points

Does Lemmy have post tags or flair or whatever it’s called?

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10 points

It is under development

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12 points
*

With Boost for Lemmy you can block specific words, really good app btw, they have their own Lemmy community. https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy

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-2 points

Thanks, sounds useful here.

Sadly I am fussy when it comes to apps and Boost appears to be proprietary.

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3 points
*

Too bad, it makes Lemmy quite pleasant to use. I’ve been using Boost for years (when it was a Reddit app), and imo he makes the best apps for these kinds of sites.

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4 points

On Android you can filter posts with the Eternity app.

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/eu.toldi.infinityforlemmy

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3 points

i mostly browse via old.lemmy.world and i am badly missing RES and its filters.

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3 points

If you’re on mobile, connect has a post filtering by keyword feature

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2 points
*

I would love that. Closest you can get is blocking the top Musk posters, my feed significantly improved since then (not perfect solution of course, as you might lose other content, and sometimes you’ll see Musk posts like these from an OP who is not always spamming them)

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2 points

Who are these top musk posters so I can block them too? So tired of hearing an asshat continue to be an asshat. Every. Single. Day.

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2 points

Dunno how to ping the mods, but maybe they should add that rule. It’s pretty annoying to get spammed about Muskrat and XXX.

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1 point

Sync can filter by keywords.

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1 point

Boost and Sync have hide support.

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110 points
*

There are going to be a lot of people saying how stupid this entire concept is in the comments.

Let me tell you something, as a person who spent years in finance. There’s no fucking chance on Earth this happens. You will win the Powerball twice consecutively before Musk pulls this off.

None of this infrastructure exists in X and all of this infrastructure is exactly the kind of shit Musk hates. Automobile regulations are fucking nothing compared to financial regs.

Adoption aside, which you’d have to be fucking insane to adopt this platform as a payments platform, the regs alone will ensure this never, ever, materializes.

What Musk describes will someday exist. He will not be involved, and the day is well over a decade away.

This is “Kanye West running for President” level of stupidity. The people close to him have let him down by not telling him how stupid this is.

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75 points
*

“Money or securities or whatever.”

Spoken like a true genius. /s

Keep burning your money, Elon; I can’t wait until you’re poor enough that no one gives a fuck what your latest horrible hot take or idea was. You won’t be missed.

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18 points

Why do we keep posting his drivel on every platform?

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17 points

Popcorn material

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15 points

Because the things he says and does affect real people, and it’s important that this behavior is known so that he doesn’t get away with his shitty misdeeds in secrecy.

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-3 points

Nah. You guys just love to bond over the mutual hatred of Elon. There’s a ton of more influencial people than him of who hardly nobody is talking about here. Elon is like Trump. They get loads of free attention and media cover largely because the haters can’t stop talking about them. Before I came to lemmy hardly remembered Elon exists.

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7 points

It’s honestly amusing to see what batshit strategy Musk will use next to fuck up Twitter. It’s like he’s trying to force every smart employee to leave, drive away every advertiser possible, and get users to find other homes.

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