X as ‘everything app’: What Elon Musk said, what authorities did

X (formerly Twitter) is on a roll. It started in April 2022, when, after months of negotiations, US tech mogul Elon Musk successfully concluded his dramatic $44-billion acquisition of the micro-blogging site, takng it private in a deal finalised on October 27, 2022.

Then trouble, or so it seemed, started. A year later, Fortune estimated that X generated a little more than $600 million in advertising revenue per quarter. For the entire 2023, Twitter was estimated to have brought in $2.5 billion in advertising revenues, a 28-per cent drop compared to 2022, Bloomberg reported.

Some reports, however, state Twitter/X generated $3.4 billion in 2023. This higher end of earnings estimates, it’s still way off the $5.01 billion it posted as a public company in 2021.

But counting the beans now, 15 months into Musk's “let that sink in” move, misses the point. The renaming from Twitter to X is no simple make-over. The revenue drop is nowhere near breaking point in a way that nearly broke Space X in 2006, when its first three failed Falcon rockets pushed Musk to the brink.

Musk has come a long way from his near-“bankwupt” moments, becoming the world’s second-richest businessman today.

Space X, with 13,000 on its payroll, has already hit $180 billion in valuation. It continues to send satellites to orbit, brings connectivity to the world’ remotest spots, frequents the International Space Station (ISS) using reusable rockets that land vertically. This, while Musk and Co, beats Toyota and Big Auto in their own game (with Tesla), and sets his sights on Mars, pouring billions to perfect Starship, the world’s biggest rocket.

The changes at X cut deep. Musk has publicly declared his aim: to turn X into an “everything app”; at the very least, as a payments platform.

The journey has not been easy — he was gaslit for laying off 6,500 people and is taunted, insulted by many on his own platform. Yet top coders within the scaled-down X team (down to about 1,500 as of August 2023), now under new CEO Linda Yaccarino (who joined in June 2023), are hard at work to roll out payments on X.

Could X do with payments what Musk did to rockets, cars and brain implants? One key lies in government authorisations.

There are signs of progress. As of January 2024, X had already secured money-transfer licences in 12 US states – Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Wyoming, as per TechCrunch.

Musk has repeatedly proven a rare ability to disrupt industries. Steering X into e-commerce is not something beyond his ken. As a self-taught coder, he wrote the game Blastar at age 12, without formal training (later sold it for $500). Musk co-wrote the original code that runs PayPal, which revolutionised global payments. He sold it for $1.5 billion in 2002 to eBay, and PayPal is now averaging 41 million transactions/day, and earned $29.13 billion in 2023.

Despite the setbacks, X has grown its user base to 556 million (up from about 320 million in Q1 of 2019, as per Statista). But that pales in comparison to China's WeChat, the world's biggest stand-alone app, which has 1.33 billion users. WeChat earned $17.49 billion in 2021 (from $16.16 billion in 2020).

The e-commerce field is wide open. Rolling out something akin to China’s most popular social-cum-payments app would further widen options currently dominated by China's Ant Financial, a $320 billion behemoth, which has diligently become bigger than any bank in the world today.

Ant, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group, currently has an outsized power: it runs the engine behind numerous e-payment platforms, through its partnerships with 250 global financial institutions, and 2 million sellers in over 200 countries.

X, once it secures the necessary money-transfer licences from a good number of jurisdictions, could see adoption spike into an “S-curve”, further boosting global ecommerce. So, imagine sending e-cash gift to someone, or paying a supplier halfway across the globe, like you’re just tweeting.

It's not a given. Getting there may be stalled by big-power scuffles: X remains banned in certain countries, though many still find a way to continue using it. WeChat, in turn, is also banned in others.

Since the October takeover, the drama at Twitter, now renamed as X, continues to unfold. From lay-offs to rebranding, from talk of “free-speech” to allegations of disinformation, to new whiz-bang features, no two moments are the same. It continues to evolve, the sort of thing that comes with the simple joys of disrupting.

The above list offers a glimpse of what's been done so far, as announced/claimed by X. Whether or not all — or none — of it is true, "x" will remain popular as a mathematical variable.

And whether X, the platform, nails e-payments or not, it's one of the biggest variables in its story from here out.