Elon Musk wants his employees to turn X into a bank. They have one year to do it
Since taking charge of Twitter a year ago , Elon Musk has left no stone unturned. He has changed the name of the social network, and now the platform, called X , wants to be much more than that. In fact, Musk wants to turn it into a super app that, among other things, replaces our bank.
The company has already started obtaining licenses for payment processing
Your next bank (in 2024) . In a conference with all X employees, Elon Musk made it clear that he wants this development to become the center of our financial activity. Not only that: his intention, as indicated in The Verge , is for these functions to appear at the end of 2024, a deadline that seems complicated for such an important transformation.
A rival for all current entities . For Musk X it will be a complete financial tool. “If money is involved, it will be on our platform. Money, funds, whatever. It’s not just that I want to send $20 to a friend. I’m talking about you won’t need a bank account.”
They are already at it . The company has been working in this direction for a few months now. At the end of August it was revealed that it requested – and obtained – licenses to process payments in various US states. Those payments also included cryptocurrency processing. Musk told his employees that he hopes to obtain everything X needs for that goal “in a few months.”
Elon’s obsession . The tycoon’s intentions have always been clear: he flirted with supporting cryptocurrencies on Twitter, but all these months he has repeated again and again his intention to replace the traditional banking system. His idea is to turn X into a kind of neobank that would radically transform the orientation with which his company was born.
Elon Musk wants to offer the definitive alternative to traditional banking, something he already tried after being one of the co-founders of PayPal
Musk knows a little about this . The truth is that this ambition comes from afar: Musk was one of the founders of X.com, one of the first online banks. He would soon join forces with Confinity Inc. to create a financial company that remains one of the major players in the market today: PayPal .
Resuming an old project . As he explained in that call with his employees, “The X/PayPal roadmap was written by me and David Sacks in July 2000. And for some reason PayPal, once integrated into eBay, not only didn’t implement the rest of list, but they stopped a lot of key features, which is crazy. So PayPal is actually a less complete product than we imagined in July 2000, 23 years ago.”
There is a long way from saying to doing . As The Verge points out , Elon Musk’s proposal has important obstacles ahead. One of the most important will come at the end of the road: even if X ends up offering all those options, will we trust Musk to hold our money?