(2023-07-29) The Everything App Why Elon Musk Wants X To Be A Wechat For The West

‘The everything app’: why Elon Musk wants X (Twitter) to be a WeChat for the west. Daily life in Chinese cities is nearly impossible to navigate without WeChat, to the extent that being barred from the country’s super-app has been likened to a “digital death”.

Commonly described as a smartphone messaging platform, it is more like several apps rolled into one, used for messaging, social media, payments, subscriptions, utility bills, food deliveries, plane and train tickets, ride hailing and much more. It is owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent.

And Elon Musk would like a rebranded Twitter to be just as indispensable in the west.

Shortly before buying Twitter, Musk wrote: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.... In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” he wrote.

Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s chief executive, has said payments and banking will be a focus for the rebranded business

Fascination with the everything app idea is not new and has been on western tech execs’ minds for years. It was reported last year that Microsoft has considered building a “super app”.

Daisley says it is a “slightly flawed premise” to presume that because everything apps have emerged and succeeded in China the same will happen elsewhere. He adds, however, that making payments a key part of a rebranded Twitter platform – a clear ambition of Musk’s – could work in the US, where the online banking and payments set-up is less well developed than in the UK and Europe. The question is whether you would trust Musk with any payments process, Daisley says.

Lucy Ingham, the head of content at FXC Intelligence, a data company, says there is a logic to Musk’s ambitions for the platform. Large numbers of people already link to payment options on their account profiles, she says. “There are lots and lots of people who ask for money through Twitter … a version of Twitter could make a commercial play with that,” she says, before adding: “You can have a really good product and a really good system, but if people don’t trust it, it’s not going to happen.”

“Why would you hand over your destiny to a third-party platform? In China you have to because everyone is on WeChat. Twitter has a very small user base,” he says, adding that Musk has shown himself to be a “very unreliable partner” since he bought Twitter.

Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter, says Musk’s ambitions could be difficult to carry out after the Tesla CEO axed 80% of the platform’s workforce. “Setting up an entire payment structure is so labour-intensive and he has cut [the workforce] to the absolute bone. To set up a payments app seems fanciful at this point.”