"Musk wants X to become more like Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, a messaging service turned super-app that offers everything from social media and video games to fintech. X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino has said X will include features such as payments and banking."
If that doesn't scream social credit score then you're intentionally ignoring it.
The only reason it works in China because it disallows the competition and also lets the government spy on everyone through a single app. In China the Internet might as well be WeChat. Twitter, sorry "X", is in for a rude awakening unless Elon pulls the app from the EU.
Also disliking popular things is just a fundamental part of American society. You’d think Musk would get this, given that his whole vibe is “king of the misanthropes.” There’s no way “everything under one brand” works here for long enough to escape the fate of us turning on that brand.
Are there major micro/restaurant payment apps in China other than WeChat? I imagine it's difficult to compete with an app that's preinstalled on every phone, integrated with every bank and used by every restaurant and street vendor. And that's ignoring the social network effect of the 900+ million daily users.
Aggressive lock-in and positioning their conglomerate's holdings to be blocks to conducting normal activity in society via any competitor.
How about I flood your whole city with robotaxi cars and make it cost a nickel a mile, but you must be an X account holder, must use the X app, must pay in X-coin, and must submit to whatever other perverse encapsulation Lord Musk decides to implement. How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites, forcing most connected people to buy from my ISP, must pay in X-coin but it also only costs 20 bucks a month. On and on, it seems pretty transparent to me.
It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future.
Is he going to make an "X" account required to operate a Tesla? Sort of like what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 11, or Facebook did with the Oculus.
You get in your car to drive to the store, but it demands you makes several public posts about how great the car is before letting you go to the store or exit the car.
> It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future
But in this scenario Twitter is like Vanuatu planning world domination. They have absolutely no leverage to compel anbody to sign up for a Twitter account. Musk would need to spend significanty more money to do any of this, and frankly, I feel like he will spend the coming year being an election provocateur than do anything productive.
Yea but competitors (Apple, Meta, Google, etc.) are better across the board and they would be able to provide alternatives or prevent these activities.
> How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites
Just cherry-picking this one but, but it would get regulated and competitors would come on to the market, and you can also obtain service from traditional providers (ISPs, and mobile providers) like you do today.
Also you can see how well these items work now ala Apple (maybe Google too?). Apple Card, iCloud, iPhone, Car Play, etc. good luck competing with that when people actively hate your products lol. I'm not super worried about this. I'm much more concerned about something like disinformation campaigns on social media or something along those lines than I am any sort of competence with Twitter turning into a dystopian nightmare machine.
You nailed the killer question. That leads to all sorts of thinking about brand management and the skills of the person at the top.
Twitter had the same level of brand recognition that google has. Musk threw that away for a bad rebrand. He just wrecked a company out of spite, or ignorance.
It's surprising he didn't do his own social media to try and outflank them on features from the ground up. It would have been cheaper too.
I think the point is that if he can pivot to do all the other things, then the social media will follow. However, the markets that he wants to get into require a high degree of customer trust--and I'm thinking he doesn't have much of that left.
Banking and social posting are at odds with one another, at least in countries where people feel they can express themselves unreservedly. In China it works as people are conditioned not to do that.
Unless he aims for influencer branding and consumption of curated content [1] and not the free expression of unpopular opinion, then it's a very cold and one dimensional target market. It's the opposite of what Twitter once was - brief musings thrown into the wind. Instead, people will consciously and deliberately pander to an audience for subs, views, and income. It'll no-longer be a platform for casual, jokey, sarcastic fluff, or raw, honest, and radical perspectives.
Musk is a staunch free speech opponent. You need not listen to what he says, just observe what he does. There may not be a single thing on this earth Musk hates more than free speech.
I've seen estimates that 65M Americans have twitter. 65M/330M is definitely enough of a critical mass to start something big.
Effectively, Musk paid $675 per (American) user to bootstrap his everything app. Probably easier to incrementally add features to the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter than to build something brand new, even if you can get a ton of sign ups when it is first announced. Take threads as an example, people got excited for approximately 1 minute, then forgot about it.
Google has probably had 100% of every American adult and child in the past 20 years, and they haven't made a dent in payments, even with their own phone ecosystem. This 65m/330m back of the envelope stuff is pure fantasy.
Unless people have no option but to use it, it won't work. For example, the onl reason I use Paypal is that 20 years ago, Ebay didn't offer an alternative. Today, I use it because I can unsubscribe from stuff with one click. I'd never use it otherwise.
Threads died because the content trends was consistent with that of Facebook, highly monetized and therefore unappealing to Twitter users. Totally irrespective of Threads, Facebook is a superior replacement to Twitter in terms of its systems, and the value of Twitter is its violent flow of unmonetizable content generated by explicitly anonymous users, and so the whole thing is where capitalism goes to die and financially there's just no way out.
That billionaire man paying generous amount to users would have been a fortunate event to users collectively, but that's it.
You have to assume they would want to limit their audience, which why would they?
They would prefer everyone using their app and not artifically limiting to a subset.
That's only something governments or captured corporations do and Twitter/X is neither. Although that could change and worth raising the possibility. Is there any way they could institute a hard constitution-like policy that could prevent it from ever sliding down that slope?
"Musk wants X to become more like Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, a messaging service turned super-app that offers everything from social media and video games to fintech. X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino has said X will include features such as payments and banking."
If that doesn't scream social credit score then you're intentionally ignoring it.