“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!
The level of delusion of this man is through the roof
Buy a social media company because you know there’s no way you’ll ever make one naturally
Claim that it’s too full of bots and try to walk out, despite having already signed the deal
Treat your new employees almost like slaves because apparently sleeping at the office is a reasonable proposition
Rebrand the social media network for no good reason, tanking value
Drive advertisers away by changing the algorithm that helped make site so good
Lose millions in company net worth and become an internet laughing stock
…Have the bright idea to save the company by also making it a… banking provider…
?!
His first garbage idea. He’s super nostalgic for X the platform her merged with PayPal to become super wealthy especially after the people that knew what they were doing had to pay him to leave.
Literally the same concept, name and everything. It’s like he thinks he can just start over at the first app and it just will be propped up by a corpse. Idiot.
I think he originally wanted to purchase the platform during the crypto boom in order to use it to add crypto nft Doge features and then the crypto market crashed and then he changed his mind about buying it but he was contractually obligated so he bought it and ruined it and now he’s going to start a bank run on toilet sentence
It continues to blow my mind that anyone cares what this fucking gasbag has to say about anything.
Lets hope the app developers leave his company.
I like my credit union.
He’s not wrong in this case, it’s doable. There are many startups building similar services with arguably fewer starting resources. You should run completely in the other direction, but it’s not impossible.
Credit products, especially virtual, are easier to create than ever thanks to companies that have built out that infrastructure. Chequing can be facilitated and held by a major bank under the hood in most cases.
It might not be his end game, but it’s definitely possible. Now, forgive me while I weep for anyone that uses it if they manage to deliver it.
But honestly who in their right mind would trust musk with their money?!?
I don’t even trust Elon Musk with Elon Musk’s money.
Well, they can always trot out the age old strategy of paying people to sign up.
Sure, but when did bring in your right mind preclude you from being a customer? There are plenty of industries based on preying on idiots
It’s hilarious how Musk gives his staff ultimatums. The fact is they can get other jobs. It’s Musk who is deeply invested in Twitter now and can’t just cut his strings so easily. Why is he the one batting them around and threatening them all the time? What the hell kind of gluttons for punishment are still working there?
The fact is they can get other jobs.
I’m guessing many of his US staff are stuck at Twitter due to the visa rules. They’re basically very well-paid slaves, and he knows it.
No doubt someone is in that situation. But I don’t think most people know how rare H1-Bs are. Only 65k are issued annually in the US, which has a total employed workforce of 157 million people.
Yeah cause the most common job is truck driver.
H1Bs that is whom
Yes a notable exception. Twitter was 8% H1-B employees prior to all the layoffs. We don’t know how many are there still.
Those folks are really living with a totally different level of concerns. “My boss is a raging asshole” is not a significant concern compared to being forced to leave the country.
As for the other 92% of the company with no visa concerns, why are any of them still there? I am tempted to assume they’re the coasters who don’t think they can find as good a paycheck anywhere else, or are just happy to ride the ship down.
Maybe they think the disaster will end, maybe they have families to support, maybe they would rather be fired and collect unemployment. Many years ago I worked for a company that got bought by Teledyne and they pretty much did what is happening to Twatter. I stuck it out until the end.
It’s hilarious how Musk gives his staff ultimatums.
In this case he didn’t though. It’s just an intentionally misleading clickbait headline and if you read the article itself there’s no mention of a ultimatum.
You’re right but it is something he does. If he’s saying this publicly I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s ultimatums privately.
it will blow my mind if Twitter even still exists by then.
Elon can’t even be trusted with his own money (or money from wealthy Saudi Arabian “benefactors”). Why would anyone give him their money?
Leverage.
Lol, yeah, this sociopath is going to develop a full suite of banking services and software in a year while laying off employees, sure.
If they did, would you trust him?
I wouldn’t. Ever.
not in a million years. Not with FDIC insurance or open-source non-custodial crypto wallets or anything like that.
His platform struggles to push text around reliably. Could you imagine using that for money?
Musk, CEO of Tesla and X (formally known as Twitter) causes catastrophic bank run, says “it doesn’t matter they can just use X now.” Join us at 11 for more.
Sounds exactly like when your employer wants you to sign up for those stupid paycard accounts instead of fill out a direct deposit form.
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!
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.Wait until you find out he founded Paypal, which was called X.com at the time
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.
Well he made PayPal.
So he probably knows a thing or two about the financial sector.
Maybe he’ll integrate PayPal into X
Nope, PayPal bought his x.com company and fired him as the CEO.
No another fascist created PayPal.
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
He didn’t make paypal. Not even a founder.
Wasn’t his company bought out by PayPal?
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.
might wanna read up on how that actually went down. he didn’t make paypal. he also didn’t make tesla, or spaceX.
He didn’t though.
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.
Wanting or able to handle it?
Yes
Somehow services like PayPal manage to avoid being regulated like a bank. I’m sure they’ll
clobbercobble together some potentially unlawful solution and not face any repercussions for it.I think because they’re a payment processor. Banks store large amounts of money, make loans, etc.
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.
They issue credit and lenders finance this. There’s always a bank.
Cobble?
“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.
And despite cobble and clobber implying violence and inelegance, cobblers are either some of the best versions of pies or the people that maintain your fanciest of shoes.
The Things been put in charge of their legal team.
It’s cobblin’ time
makes shoes
Yes, jesus thank you. It was right on the tip of my tongue.
iirc the money storage aspect of PayPal has to be regulated as a bank.
Paypal is a bank here in europe. Hope musXk leaves Europe.
He’s recreating Venmo. 😂
which is owned by paypal, which he already got out of…
And let’s remind everyone because people seem to forget.
I pretty much run everything through paypal for the extra layer of security.
It saved my ass when I was doxxed and hacked. I had my logins and financial information stolen.
I can totally see not putting more than a few thousand into the balance if you’re going to use it like a secured credit card.
Otherwise, keeping $0 in it and using it as a middle man between your bank and the outside world is a fantastic solution to protecting yourself.
Was forced out of after he almost tanked the company trying to do this exact thing.
What’s the definition of insanity again?
Yeah, it’s not an original idea. He’s recycling his ideas.
ExTwitter
Paypal^2
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
Which are basically operating systems, and therefore not needed and against the rules of the iOS and Android app stores.
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.
Yeah, I have trouble imagining this working in the US, even if Musk hadn’t spent a year flushing his cash and credibility down the drain.
I don’t see it working in Sweden either.
- We have apps for identifying ourselves digitally, most popular being BankID, but there are alternatives like Freja E-ID and various others.
- We have apps for easy money transfers, Swish being the most prominent, and it can be used to pay in stores and such as well.
- We have apps that combine economy management and shopping, I’ve no idea how popular they are, but Klarna comes to mind.
Amazon launched here a couple of years ago, and I think they’ve clawed out a niche in the market shockingly, but they’re not the “go to marketplace” for everything. If I want to buy electronics there’s like at least half a dozen online (that often have physical locations) stores I’d go to first. Same thing for larger appliances, clothes, make-up/beauty/skin-hair-care, shoes, sporting goods, furniture. Amazon is mostly for like weird niche stuff, like it’s the only place I could find a detergent that’s designed for robot mops that doesn’t contain tea-tree oil. Amazon is also a decent place to find mass-produced cheap garbage tat, like LED string lights and what have you.
They also make use of the same delivery services that all other stores do, so there’s no point in using them if you want speedy deliveries. I also don’t feel safe as a buyer when using Amazon because while I’m sure they have to be compliant with Swedish consumer laws, I’m also positive they’ll make the experience as tricky to navigate as possible. If I buy a motherboard from say Inet, and it breaks, I can just send an email to Jonas at Inet and they’ll sort it out. Nothing will be that straight-forward with Amazon.
Anyway, the point of that massive segue is; if a MASSIVE specialised company like Amazon has failed to fully establish themselves in their own niche here in Sweden, how on earth would a broken microblogging platform manage to “out-compete” other, trusted, and established services?
Musk is aiming to use twitter for a niche that doesn’t exist. Literally the only demand for this dream platform of his, is himself.
Speaking of buying weird niche items from Amazon: I’ve ordered spare parts and other weird and obscure electronics from Amazon so many times that now they think I’m a company and that I should have a company account.
How did this happen? If I want to buy normal stuff, I’ll walk to a normal store and buy it there. If I need something a bit more special, I’ll probably find it somewhere within a 2000 km radius. If nobody sells what I need, I’ll try Amazon. That’s why my shopping history looks like I’m running some special company.
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
I don’t see how this would work outside of authoritarian countries
I mean, you saw the people he was meeting up with during world cup and stuff right? I think that’s the plan.
That explains him supporting the alt-right.
The Chinese super apps didn’t really have government institutions on board, aside from the chat censorship aspect which was the main thing the government was originally paying attention to. In other aspects, the Chinese government and its regulators didn’t initially get involved, and the rapid dominance of Alibaba and Tencent took them by surprise.
The super apps benefitted from a mix of rapid smartphone adoption, first mover advantages, weak consumer protections, and fierce competition with each other. It’s probably that combination of circumstances that’s hard to replicate, not the authoritarian country bit (there are lots of authoritarian countries that haven’t fostered super apps).
The Chinese government was not entirely happy about the result; for example, the dominance of WeChat Pay and AliPay poses a threat to the state-owned banks, which are a major channel of government control over the economy. That is why the Chinese government has spent the last few years cracking down on the super app companies in various ways.
Yeh was going to say this sounds more like wechat.
He was involved with PayPal so it’s not a huge stretch but I wouldn’t trust anything with that clown.
He was ousted from PayPal before it become PayPal. Actually his name for the service was X, so this might be long awaited dream.
He really wasn’t that involved. He was trying to build an everything app. Peter Theil went with PayPal and booted Elon.
Best he will do is another paypal/venmo thing. No way its gonna be a bank.
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.
I wouldn’t trust this trust fund mafioso with a plastic spoon, let alone banking credentials.
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.
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
- Become bank
- …
- Too big to fail
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.
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.
people are very hesitant to switch banks.
Wells Fargo still existing is pretty good evidence
Ignoring the Elon factor….it will still be a bank account. It will just be a bank account that can only be managed through twitter.
Thats not a better banking experience.
Unless twitter gets an actual bank charter and is regulated by the FDIC, X wouldn’t get a cent from me. Even if they claimed to pay incredible APY. Elon musk would steal billions from his customers and wouldn’t blink. And if your deposits aren’t insured then your money isn’t real.
Even if he did all that, why would you ever give him anything?
