Elon Musk has a predilection for the letter “X”. He names his son with singer Grimes, whose real name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X”. He called the company he created to buy Twitter “X Holdings.” His rocket company is, naturally, SpaceX.
Now it also apparently intends to transform Twitter into an “everything app” it calls X.
For months, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat, a “super app” that performs video chat, messaging, streaming and payments, for the rest of the world. At least, that is to say, once he has finished buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion buyout deal he signed in April.
There are just some obstacles. The first is that a Musk-owned Twitter would not be the only global company pursuing this goal, and, in fact, would likely be catching up with its rivals. Next up is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app, or any other super app, to begin with.
Start with competition and consumer demand. Facebook parent Meta has spent years trying to make its flagship platform a destination for everything online, adding payment, gaming, shopping and even dating features to its social network. So far, it has had little success; almost all of his income still comes from advertising.
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 purchases, communications and payments.
“Old habits are hard to break, and people in the US are used to using different apps for different activities,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. Enberg also points out that super apps are likely to suck up more personal data at a time when trust in social platforms has deteriorated significantly.
Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. 4, the day he backed down on his attempts to back out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerator to create X, the app of everything,” he tweeted without further explanation.
But he has 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 “has a good idea of where to lead the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”
And it left some clear hints that handling payments for goods and services would be a key part of the app. Musk said he has a “bigger view” of what X.com could have been, an online bank that started early in his career and eventually became part of PayPal.
“Obviously that could start from scratch, but I think Twitter would help speed it up by three to five years,” Musk said in August. “So it’s something 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 to a US or global audience. WeChat use is almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and switched directly to going online via mobile phone.
Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has become 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 that the public should use to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China has 1 billion Internet users, almost all of whom connect via mobile phones, according to the government-licensed China Internet Network Information Center. Only 33% use desktop computers and mostly in addition to mobile phones. Tencent says that WeChat had 1.3 billion users worldwide at the end of June.
Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to create apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. They are not the only ones.
WeChat has added video calls and other messaging features, as well as shopping, entertainment and other features. Government agencies use it to send health, traffic, and other announcements. Meanwhile, WeChat’s payment function is used so much that coffee shops, museums and some other businesses refuse cash and accept payments only through WeChat or the rival Ant app.
There is no comparable app in the US, despite the efforts of tech companies.
It’s worth remembering that Musk’s grand visions don’t always turn out the way he seems to hope. Humans are nowhere near colonizing Mars, and their promised robotaxis fleet remains as far from reality as the metaverse.
Twitter’s user base is also small compared to its social platform competitors. While Facebook, Instagram and TikTok passed the one billion mark long ago, Twitter has around 240 million daily users.
“Not only would Musk have to overcome the hurdle of convincing consumers to change their behavior online, but also that Twitter is the place to do it,” Enberg said.
Associated Press writer Joe McDonald contributed to this story.