Now, Elon Musk’s name can be found in every industry.
A few days later, at the beginning of October 2022, the prominent businessperson announced the launch of two prototypes of humanoid robots, presented a scabrous peace plan to end the conflict in Ukraine and made the final decision to purchase Twitter at the price initially agreed upon in the spring without going through the trial. All of these events took place within a span of just a few days.
What are your plans for tomorrow? Following the announcement, a businessman posted a puzzling tweet that read, “The purchase of Twitter is a gas pedal to create X, the app of everything.” This is a reference to the “super applications” used in China, such as WeChat or Alipay. These two extremely well-liked platforms are marketed as portals that provide access to a variety of services, including messaging, social networking, shopping, and payment, amongst many others.
In 1999, Elon Musk established an actual business known as “The Letter X.”
Even back then, the business envisioned itself as “a banking super app” that would be able to host a variety of financial services such as deposits, insurance, and mortgages. But X only had moderate success, and the firm didn’t last very long before being acquired by PayPal, a well-known application for making payments over the internet.
In 2017, Musk repurchased the X.com domain name “for emotional reasons,” according to a press release. It reappears online with no content other than a tiny cross that has been installed in the top left corner of the screen. A brand-new black hole. up until the point where Twitter was presented with an offer of $44 billion.
A note in connection with the platform buyout then mentions plans for a new “X” subscription with the goal of exceeding one hundred million users by the year 2028. “I have a kind of grand vision for what X.com or company X could have been,” the narrator says. I don’t need Twitter, but Twitter could probably speed it up by three years,” he had also said at the general meeting of his Tesla flagship company in August of 2022.
As a result, Twitter might become intertwined with X. Or the opposite could be true.
In any event, it’s a risky bet considering how uncommon “super apps” are. First and foremost, the WeChat or Alipay model is one that is difficult to replicate outside of China. The country has a market that is both large and very little competitive; however, Western businesses are not permitted to operate in the country.
In places like Europe or the United States, things work differently than they do in China. For example, Amazon rules the e-commerce market, Meta rules the social networking market, and Apple rules the payment market. This is something that the regulators are keeping an eye on.
Developing a game-changing app in the West is an extremely challenging endeavor. To be able to multiply services and ensure that they are both effective and innovative, you need to be able to count on a large number of users. Twitter is getting off to a very slow start because its mobile app “only” has 230 million users, whereas WeChat has more than a billion users. The same can be said about Snap, which, before experiencing a precipitous decline, attempted, for some time, to incorporate activities such as online shopping, meditation, and live video streaming into its application.
In spite of Meta’s best efforts, not even the enormous Facebook, which has nearly 4 billion users, was ever able to become a “super app.”
Elon Musk’s desire to create X, his super app, has been hampered by the fact that the timing is not ideal. The economic downturn that has been brought on by the conflict in Ukraine has dealt a significant blow to the technology sector. The level of competition is high, and there are fewer people willing to invest. Start-ups linked to finance, such as X would be, are hit even harder by this trend: in Europe, a behemoth like Klarna has seen its valuation drop by 85%, from 45.6 billion dollars to 6.7 billion dollars.
The continued obscurity surrounding Musk’s goals for X is a significant factor in the company’s recent success.
“I have an idea for a social media platform that would be based on the Blockchain and would be able to do both payments and short messages or links in the manner of Twitter. A negligible fee must be paid in order for your message to be registered on the blockchain. This will prevent the vast majority of spam and automated messages from being sent. On April 9, 2022, the billionaire has another conversation via text message, this time with his brother Kimbal. In this conversation, the billionaire promises that freedom of expression will be protected.
Where does Elon Musk hope to travel to? Towards the creation of a “super app” and a Twitter-like platform in the style of Web3?
In the early spring of 2022, the CEO of SpaceX expressed his desire to remove Twitter from public trading, improve the platform’s subscription policy, and make the platform’s moderation more adaptable. This would assist bluebird in reaching a revenue of $26.4 billion by the year 2028, which would be five times the amount it had at the time of its acquisition.
The urgency of reimagining Twitter is perhaps best demonstrated by Musk’s inappropriate behavior.
The social networking site’s net losses skyrocketed to a total of $270 million during the second quarter. Just in the month of September 2022, the company lost more than 700 employees, and many people have a very negative opinion of Musk’s takeovers of the company. The CEO of Tesla, on the other hand, has already sold shares worth $15.4 billion in order to finance his acquisition of Twitter. After his post on the social network, the price of his company has dropped by more than 5% in just the past twenty-four hours.
There is still reason for optimism for Elon Musk, and that is the fact that the financial markets continue to have faith in his capability of overcoming any obstacle. After the news of Musk’s takeover was announced, there was an immediate increase of more than 20 percent in Twitter’s stock price on the market. despite the significant haziness that surrounds its prospects in the future.
