Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” following his agreement to buy the social media giant.
Musk is now expected to own the company within a matter of weeks, if not days, and has made promises to make changes to protect freedom of speech.
He has said that the social media service could charge subscription fees in the future to business and government users.The billionaire entrepreneur explained that his acquisition of Twitter was part of his plan to create an “everything app,” known simply as “X.”
X.com was the name of an online bank that Musk co-founded in 1999, which later changed its name to PayPal a year later after merging with software company Confinity.
The online marketplace eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, but later spun it off as an independent company in 2015.
Musk, back in 2017, reacquired the rights to the X.com domain name from eBay and relaunched the site.
The Return of “X”
Musk compared his vision for Twitter with the vision he had for X during Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August.The Tesla CEO exclaimed that he had a “grander vision” for what he thought X.com could have been.
“It’s a pretty, pretty grand vision,” said Musk, “now obviously, that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years. So it’s kind of like something I thought would be useful for a long time.”
“I know what to do, I don’t have to have Twitter for that but it would, like I said, it’s probably at least a three-year accelerant, and I think it’s something that will be very useful to the world,” he explained.
Musk later brought up the possibility of making X.com Twitter’s competitor if the deal didn’t go through, following the August meeting.
Musk, however, has provided few other details as to what the proposed platform would look like.
Industry analysts suggest that he is eyeing something along the lines of an app that incorporates multiple services, including messaging, social media, payments, and food orders, similar to China’s WeChat.
WeChat, which was created by Tencent Holdings, is a multi-purpose app that combines most of those functions.That “everything app” has amassed more than 1.2 billion users since its initial release in 2011, mainly among the ethnic Chinese community.
At a June town hall with Twitter employees, Musk said that he wanted to expand Twitter to one billion users, and that he wanted to replicate WeChat’s model, after noticing that people in China “basically live” on the platform, explaining, “If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.”
