Elon Musk, the TeslaTSLA billionaire who took the social media company Twitter private last year and rebranded it X, has outlined his grand plan for the platform at an “all-hands” virtual meeting.
The details of the call, leaked to The Verge, include plans to grow X’s financial services arm to rival banks and PayPalPYPL, described by Musk as “mind-blowing” if it’s not rolled out by the end of 2024.
Following the call being leaked, prominent voices in the bitcoin and crypto space called the plan something that could spur a “critical mass” of crypto adoption, potentially mirroring PayPal’s bitcoin adoption in late 2020 that triggered the last bitcoin price bull run.
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“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk reportedly said on the anniversary of his takeover of the company, adding people will be surprised “just how powerful it is.”
“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.”
Speculation has swirled since Musk first made a bid for Twitter in early 2022 that he could add significant payment, financial and banking features to the platform, with leaked text between Musk and his brother Kimbal revealing he considered using bitcoin’s blockchain technology.
Since then, he’s acquired money transmitter licenses for X in various U.S. states while a leak suggested Musk could turn X (Twitter) into an “updated version of PayPal.”
However, Musk denied media reports that said X could add a trading platform built inside the app as part of a plan to turn the app into a financial-data giant, with Musk going on to say X will never launch a cryptocurrency of its own to rival bitcoin, ethereum, XRPXRPXRP or Musk’s “fave” cryptocurrency dogecoin.
“Just in time for the sovereign debt crisis,” tech investor and former CoinbaseCOIN chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan posted to X, referring to the ballooning U.S. debt pile that increased dramatically over the last few years.
Srinivasan made headlines earlier this year when he made a bet the bitcoin price would sky-rocket to $1 million per bitcoin by July due to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive tightening program in the wake of its ultra-loose monetary policy during the Covid pandemic. Some feared this would trigger a global financial meltdown and the collapse of the established financial system.
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Bond prices have since gone haywire, with the market going into meltdown and yields, which move inversely to prices, soaring to a 16-year high.
Srinivasan and others suggested Musk could roll out a crypto wallet feature on X, similar to PayPal’s bitcoin and crypto service.
“Maybe X issues a self-custodied crypto wallet to every user. Then we get a critical mass of several hundred million people across borders with free speech and hard money right as things melt down,” Srinivasan predicted, calling it “Elon’s Ark.”
“Bet you the first currency he uses is dogecoin,” podcast host and entrepreneur Vinny Lingham posted.
“The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000,” Musk reportedly said on the internal X call. “And for some reason PayPal, once it became eBayEBAY, not only did they not implement the rest of the list, but they actually rolled back a bunch of key features, which is crazy. So PayPal is actually a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago.”
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