Musk and Money Transmission

Dateline: Woking, 10th April 2024.Elon Musk has talked about plans to turn Twitter, now known as X (or TwiX, to me) into a payments platform that will give users the ability to send money to one another and move money into and out of bank accounts. The company has committed to launch peer-to-peer payments, “unlocking more user utility and new opportunities for commerce, and showcasing the power of living more of your life in one place”. This is part of what seems to be a wider vision of X as a a kind of “super app”, a Western version of WeChat, where users will read the news, book travel, pay taxes and everything else. It’s an exciting and challenging goal, but I think it’s going to be difficult to disrupt this particular market.with kind permission of Helen Holmes (CC-BY-ND 4.0)Subscribe nowMoney & MonetisablePeople who are tweeting from time to time (eg, me) tend to think that everyone is on X. But they are not. It is not even in the top 10 most used social media networks. Facebook has more than three billion monthly active users, whereas X has a tenth of that and most of them are not particularly active, since data shows that almost all tweets (92%) come from just 10% of them. Most people come to X to check in on the news or find entertainment rather than to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge.Nonetheless, there are users (mostly male, dominated by the 25-34 age group) who do represent…Musk and Money Transmission