“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!
My girlfriend has a theory that he’s trying to destroy the platform deliberately. I disagreed with her until he renamed it to X lol
Been saying that for a while now too. The people bankrolling him; Saudi Arabia and Russia, have a vested interest in seeing Twitter burn after the Arab Spring organized around it, and Ukraine found so much support on the platform. The thing is, he can’t directly run it into the ground without lawsuits so he’s doing it piece by piece.
Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works on why this does not make any sense.
- When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.
- He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
- If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
- If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.
Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.
Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.
It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.
Could have been both, twitter gets messed with enough to drive off normal people and musk gets to rebuild it from the ground up afterwards using what ever is left or they knew musk would be poison to twitter and let him just have fun with it
Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.
This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.
It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.
Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don’t see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.
I don’t think he meant to. He’s just an idiot.
Right wing control of Twitter was always my hypothesis, since, as people have pointed out, Twitter gave regular people access to people with influence. Destroying Twitter destroys that access, but it was more valuable as a tool to manufacture consent, like most media.
to right wingers, failure is good as success
think about it, trump is a godlike business man despite failing numerous times at all his businesses. he loses the election people still think he won. caught with nuclear codes giving them to enemy intelligence? it was probably a librul framing him.
if x goes under people will say it’s part of musk’s master plan
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.
Best he will do is another paypal/venmo thing. No way its gonna be a bank.
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.
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.
“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.
I think because they’re a payment processor. Banks store large amounts of money, make loans, etc.
Well he made PayPal.
So he probably knows a thing or two about the financial sector.
Maybe he’ll integrate PayPal into X
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.
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.
FWIW his white whale or inspiration is more like the Chinese “we do everything” apps / platforms https://wise.com/us/blog/chinese-payment-app
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.
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
He was involved with PayPal so it’s not a huge stretch but I wouldn’t trust anything with that clown.
And let’s remind everyone because people seem to forget.
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.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The company is currently working on locking down money transmission licenses across the US so that it can offer financial services.
“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.
The original article contains 400 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Seems like he is going ahead with the X “The Everything App” idea. I’m glad I use parts of the Fediverse and hope to build my own instance at some stage as I really don’t want people like Musk owning my data let alone charge me for it and control my money.
He’ll just steal it. And if you fight back, he’ll sue you into oblivion. It’s the capitalist way.
@slurpeesoforion The worst bit is, the US government seem to be on his side
I’d rather let a crack addict manage my money than let Musky any near it.
I’d rather let a crack addict manage my balls than let Musk anywhere near my money.
