Elon Musk wants your “entire financial life” on X by 2024

One year into Elon Musk's ownership of X, the finances of the platform formerly known as Twitter remain shaky. But the ongoing money troubles haven't stopped Musk from forging ahead with his plan to turn X into a bank, a move he said last November would be key to helping the platform avoid bankruptcy. On an earnings call yesterday, Musk told X employees that he predicts X's payments system will launch by the end of 2024, The Verge reported.

“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said, confirming that “when I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life. 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.”

In January, Musk took his first steps toward this ambitious goal by registering Twitter Payments LLC with the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. This was a necessary step for Twitter to start transmitting money between users in all states and US territories, and according to The Verge, Musk confirmed that he expects to get the rest of the money-transmitting licenses "in the next few months."

But Musk's vision goes beyond enabling payments within the US. X CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed in a blog post yesterday that while X has already secured money-transmitter licenses "in several states," X is "moving toward launching a global payment system."

"More soon!" Yaccarino's blog promised.

When Musk announced his vision to turn X into an "everything app" where users go to text, call, pay, shop, bank, and post online, financial services experts told Ars that the hurdles Musk would face were "pretty high." X would need to earn trust from both users and regulators, with the former already having plenty of banking solutions to choose from and the latter becoming increasingly critical of novel digital payment entities.

Experts predicted that "the choke points of finance might restrict" Musk from achieving his dream of turning X into what he described at a November conference last year as "the most valuable financial institution in the world."

But one way to win over users, experts said, was to monetize activity on X and then incentivize users to keep their funds on the platform by turning their user account into what Musk described last year as "a high-yield money market account, so that having a Twitter balance is the highest-yield thing that you can do.”

Half of that plan is already in motion, as X began paying creators on the platform last year. Yaccarino's blog post said that so far, X has "paid out more than $20 million to our creator community," and a post from the X account said that "maximizing prosperity for content creators" remained among the platform's primary goals heading into 2024.

On the earnings call, Musk reiterated that his plan for X was to fully realize the roadmap that he and David Sacks initially wrote for PayPal in 2000. Musk told X employees that he remained baffled that PayPal never completed that roadmap, saying that he thinks people will be surprised “just how powerful it is" once X picks up the ball that PayPal dropped.

"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," Musk said on the call. "So PayPal is actually a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago.”

What may have held PayPal back from completing the roadmap were the potential risks involved. Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance explained that in the earliest days of online banking, Musk felt that financial institutions were too hesitant to embrace true innovation. This hesitancy, Musk seemed to feel, left open opportunities for people like him, who are willing to take risks and chase innovation in the financial sector. On the earnings call, Musk told X employees that his efforts to turn Twitter into an everything app will one day "exceed" China's everything app (called WeChat) and is happening at "the fastest rate of innovation maybe ever for any Internet company,” The Verge reported.

Last year, Musk said that he expected to launch X as an everything app within three to five years. If X launches payments by the end of 2024, it will officially have what experts said are the key ingredients of an everything app: communications features like texting, calling, and posting online; financial features like enabling creator payouts and offering bank accounts; and e-commerce features likely expanding on Twitter Shops.

But Musk's everything app dreams would easily be crushed if X doesn’t draw enough users looking for the platform to invalidate their favorite apps and become the one online interface to rule them all. Currently, X is struggling to engage users with new features like calling or creator payouts. Total X users are slightly down, and time spent on the platform keeps falling, market research firms this month told Ars.

Yaccarino, who was brought on board to help Musk steer X toward profitability, remains optimistic about the platform's outlook for 2024. She seems to expect that X users will soon see the platform as so much more than the place they used to go to read tweets. In her blog, she said that rebranding Twitter into X was about evolving "past a legacy mindset" and reimagining "how users around the world consume, interact, watch, and, soon, transact—all in one seamless interface."

Regarding X's global payments features currently in development, though, Yaccarino's blog might raise some regulators' eyebrows, as it's still unclear what payment rails X plans to use. Enforcers have grown increasingly wary of novel fintech solutions enabling speedy payments—especially when those services occur outside normal banking regulations—which is why some fintech companies have begun calling for clearer regulations to support more innovation.

"We want money on X to flow as freely as information and conversation," Yaccarino said.