Musk Has a ‘Super App’ Plan for Twitter. It’s Super Vague

For a really long time, the Tesla and SpaceX President has communicated interest in making his own rendition of China’s WeChat — a “super application” that does video talks, informing, web based and installments — until the end of the world.

Elon Musk has an inclination for the letter “X.” He calls his child with the vocalist Grimes, whose real name is an assortment of letters and images, “X.” He named the organization he made to purchase Twitter “X Property.” His rocket organization is, normally, SpaceX.Now he likewise evidently plans to transform Twitter into an “everything application” he calls X.

For months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments — for the rest of the world. At least, that is, once he’s done buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion purchase agreement he signed in April.

There are just a few obstacles. First is that a Musk-owned Twitter wouldn’t be the only global company in pursuit of this goal, and in fact would probably be playing catch-up with its rivals. Next is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app— or any other super app — to begin with.

Begin with the opposition and purchaser interest. Facebook parent Meta has gone through years attempting to make its leader stage an objective for everything web based, adding installments, games, shopping and in any event, dating highlights to its informal community. All up until this point, it’s had little achievement; practically its income actually comes from publicizing.

Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber and others have also tried to jump on the super app bandwagon, expanding their offerings in an effort to become indispensable to people as they go about their day. None have set the world on fire so far, not least because people already have a number of apps at their disposal to handle shopping, communicating and payments.

“Old propensities are difficult to break, and individuals in the U.S. are accustomed to utilizing different applications for various exercises,” said Jasmine Enberg, head investigator at Insider Knowledge. Enberg likewise takes note of that super applications would probably suck up additional individual information when trust in friendly stages has disintegrated essentially.

Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. 4, the day he reversed his attempts to get out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted without further explanation.

But he’s provided at least a little more detail in the past. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk told the crowd at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he thinks he’s “got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”

What’s more, he’s dropped a few in number clues that taking care of installments for labor and products would be a critical piece of the application. Musk said he has a “more terrific vision” for what X.com, a web-based bank he began from the get-go in his vocation that in the end turned out to be important for PayPal, might have been.

“Obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk said in August. “So it’s kind of something that I thought would be quite useful for a long time. I know what to do.”

But it’s not clear that WeChat’s success in China means the same idea would translate for a U.S. or global audience. WeChat usage in almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and skipped straight to going online by mobile phone.

Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has made itself a one-stop shop for payments and other services and is starting to compete in entertainment. It is also a platform for health code apps the public is required to use prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

China has 1 billion web clients, and essentially every one of them go internet based by cell phone, as indicated by the public authority endorsed China Web Organization Data Center. Just 33% use work stations by any stretch of the imagination — and for the most part notwithstanding cell phones. Tencent says WeChat had 1.3 billion clients overall as of the finish of June.

Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to make apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. They’re not the only ones.

WeChat has added video calls and other message highlights as well as shopping, amusement and different elements. Government offices use it to convey wellbeing, traffic and different declarations. WeChat’s installment capability, in the mean time, is so generally utilized that cafés, exhibition halls and a few different organizations reject money and will take installment just through WeChat or the opponent Subterranean insect application.

There is no comparable app in the U.S., despite tech companies’ efforts.

It’s worth remembering that Musk’s grand visions don’t always work out the way he appears to expect. Humans are nowhere near colonizing Mars and his promised fleet of robotaxis remains about as far from reality as the metaverse.

Twitter’s user base is also tiny relative to those at its social-platform competitors. While Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all passed the 1 billion mark long ago, Twitter has about 240 million daily users.

“Musk wouldn’t just need to defeat the obstacle of persuading shoppers to change how they act on the web, yet additionally that Twitter is the spot to make it happen,” Enberg said.