“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
Just wait till Musk learns about banking regulations.
He’s already complaining about the EU regulations on social media, but they nothing compared to what banks have to deal with.
If this product moves forward, it’s likely to be on a small scale. For example, like when a person needs to send a friend reimbursement for a coffee. So, initially, if it needs a simple name for paying back friends, or other pals, why not just call it Pay-A-Pal, or PayPal for short.
No bank account, no actual cash and everything happens in the system. It’s revolutionary! It’s like digital transactions that happen through pure accounting for a small fee. Like credit cards, but those are old.
Without getting official government institutions on board or making the app mandatory in some way, I don’t see how this would work outside of authoritarian countries
The Chinese super apps didn’t really have government institutions on board, aside from the chat censorship aspect which was the main thing the government was originally paying attention to. In other aspects, the Chinese government and its regulators didn’t initially get involved, and the rapid dominance of Alibaba and Tencent took them by surprise.
The super apps benefitted from a mix of rapid smartphone adoption, first mover advantages, weak consumer protections, and fierce competition with each other. It’s probably that combination of circumstances that’s hard to replicate, not the authoritarian country bit (there are lots of authoritarian countries that haven’t fostered super apps).
The Chinese government was not entirely happy about the result; for example, the dominance of WeChat Pay and AliPay poses a threat to the state-owned banks, which are a major channel of government control over the economy. That is why the Chinese government has spent the last few years cracking down on the super app companies in various ways.
The thing about these everything apps is that they filled a niche in the markets they’ve succeeded in. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, Google doesn’t operate their Play services or Google Pay in China, meaning there was a vacuum for something else to fill it. WeChat and AliPay has done that.
It’d take a LOT of effort to build a platform like Paytm for the U.S., nevermind other markets. You can’t just buy a microblogging platform and magically redevelop it into something like Paytm. He’d need to partner with other businesses and whatnot, and I just don’t see there being any sort of interest in that kind of partnership.
There’s been attempts to build these sorts of “everything apps” before. Facebook has tried and failed. I think Snapchat has tried it. Apps here in the west tend to focus on doing a single or a handful of tasks really well. If an app ends up doing too much, it’s often split into several apps.
We have apps for identifying ourselves digitally, most popular being BankID, but there are alternatives like Freja E-ID and various others.
We have apps for easy money transfers, Swish being the most prominent, and it can be used to pay in stores and such as well.
We have apps that combine economy management and shopping, I’ve no idea how popular they are, but Klarna comes to mind.
Amazon launched here a couple of years ago, and I think they’ve clawed out a niche in the market shockingly, but they’re not the “go to marketplace” for everything. If I want to buy electronics there’s like at least half a dozen online (that often have physical locations) stores I’d go to first. Same thing for larger appliances, clothes, make-up/beauty/skin-hair-care, shoes, sporting goods, furniture. Amazon is mostly for like weird niche stuff, like it’s the only place I could find a detergent that’s designed for robot mops that doesn’t contain tea-tree oil. Amazon is also a decent place to find mass-produced cheap garbage tat, like LED string lights and what have you.
They also make use of the same delivery services that all other stores do, so there’s no point in using them if you want speedy deliveries. I also don’t feel safe as a buyer when using Amazon because while I’m sure they have to be compliant with Swedish consumer laws, I’m also positive they’ll make the experience as tricky to navigate as possible. If I buy a motherboard from say Inet, and it breaks, I can just send an email to Jonas at Inet and they’ll sort it out. Nothing will be that straight-forward with Amazon.
Anyway, the point of that massive segue is; if a MASSIVE specialised company like Amazon has failed to fully establish themselves in their own niche here in Sweden, how on earth would a broken microblogging platform manage to “out-compete” other, trusted, and established services?
Musk is aiming to use twitter for a niche that doesn’t exist. Literally the only demand for this dream platform of his, is himself.
Speaking of buying weird niche items from Amazon: I’ve ordered spare parts and other weird and obscure electronics from Amazon so many times that now they think I’m a company and that I should have a company account.
How did this happen? If I want to buy normal stuff, I’ll walk to a normal store and buy it there. If I need something a bit more special, I’ll probably find it somewhere within a 2000 km radius. If nobody sells what I need, I’ll try Amazon. That’s why my shopping history looks like I’m running some special company.
Even if he complies to all the regs. There is no way people in the west will switch to his app. The reason why those all-in-one apps took off in China and Southeast Asia is because banking infrastructure sucked hard before. You could only pay cash in most places unless you went to more upscale stores. Because those payment terminals are just too expensive for many small time businesses. With the arrival of those apps even a street vendor could afford to accept digital payments. Thus lots of people started using those apps to pay. The western countries already have good banking infrastructure and people are very hesitant to switch banks.
I think it’s plausible he will actually pull X out of the EU completely and concentrate on the US. Banking regulations around the world vary greatly and I can’t see him wanting to handle all that.
He didn’t found paypal (or x.com for that matter) but he was CEO (?) of X when it acquired paypal, which promptly ousted him for trying to rebrand paypal to X despite the former already have massive brand recognition thanks to its exclusive partnership with eBay.
Don’t believe all the bullshit about what he has “created”. He was fired, but got to keep is equity. Peter Thiel was the PayPal founder.
Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2008.
For a long while, Elon was very successful and very popular. Like most CEOs, he claimed all the work at Tesla and SpaceX is of his own creation. And sure, I am sure he was responsible for a lot of the financial success of those two companies. He sets goals for a company and the people in those companies try to achieve those goals. In Elon’s case, he sets many goals and many projections that tend to fall flat. That doesn’t matter if you are successful in getting more investors and boost stock prices.
However, once he started running his mouth on Twitter, it became very clear that his charisma couldn’t keep up.
Also, the financial sector is nothing like it was when PayPal was founded. There weren’t regulations in place that could apply directly to that kind of company yet. While he may know more about the financial sector simply because he deals with many more zeros on a daily basis, his “revolutionary” description of how he wants to transform X shows that he is way out of touch.
Quite simply, Elon has proven that he cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to reporting anything financial. For example, him and the “CEO” of X are currently saying that advertisers are returning at record rates. This is getting proven wrong, or being shown as misleading at best.
Somehow services like PayPal manage to avoid being regulated like a bank. I’m sure they’ll clobber cobble together some potentially unlawful solution and not face any repercussions for it.
"Clobber" implies violence, which is somehow even less elegant than the standard phrase that the haphazard "cobble" implies. Given the shitshow of X so far, clobber probably works better even if it's not the usual way to phrase this at all.
And despite cobble and clobber implying violence and inelegance, cobblers are either some of the best versions of pies or the people that maintain your fanciest of shoes.
Paypal was built on the idea of a system that was without regulations that were tough. Paypal in the UK operated out of Ireland up until recently out of FCA control knowing full well they were committing fraud on a grand scale with things like "We're closing your account and if you want your money back get in contact with us in 180days time" which was the email people used to get when the system didnt like you for any reason.
Strongly disagree with your statement. Imo, he is clearly better at managing money than most other people, as he is far richer. I mean, just look at his bank account. Thankfully, I have saved up for the latest Tesla and am hopefully catching up to him in net worth someday.
I would love that. Closest you can get is blocking the top Musk posters, my feed significantly improved since then (not perfect solution of course, as you might lose other content, and sometimes you’ll see Musk posts like these from an OP who is not always spamming them)
Too bad, it makes Lemmy quite pleasant to use. I’ve been using Boost for years (when it was a Reddit app), and imo he makes the best apps for these kinds of sites.
There are going to be a lot of people saying how stupid this entire concept is in the comments.
Let me tell you something, as a person who spent years in finance. There’s no fucking chance on Earth this happens. You will win the Powerball twice consecutively before Musk pulls this off.
None of this infrastructure exists in X and all of this infrastructure is exactly the kind of shit Musk hates. Automobile regulations are fucking nothing compared to financial regs.
Adoption aside, which you’d have to be fucking insane to adopt this platform as a payments platform, the regs alone will ensure this never, ever, materializes.
What Musk describes will someday exist. He will not be involved, and the day is well over a decade away.
This is “Kanye West running for President” level of stupidity. The people close to him have let him down by not telling him how stupid this is.
All true, but there’s no detail in that article saying that’s what he wants to do. Copying Apple’s approach where they’re a front end to an existing bank, also fits the narrative.
I wonder if an app to unite all your online services would be legit, but I can’t see those services cooperating with that, so you’d effectively have to be malware
Keep burning your money, Elon; I can’t wait until you’re poor enough that no one gives a fuck what your latest horrible hot take or idea was. You won’t be missed.
It’s honestly amusing to see what batshit strategy Musk will use next to fuck up Twitter. It’s like he’s trying to force every smart employee to leave, drive away every advertiser possible, and get users to find other homes.
Because the things he says and does affect real people, and it's important that this behavior is known so that he doesn't get away with his shitty misdeeds in secrecy.
Nah. You guys just love to bond over the mutual hatred of Elon. There’s a ton of more influencial people than him of who hardly nobody is talking about here. Elon is like Trump. They get loads of free attention and media cover largely because the haters can’t stop talking about them. Before I came to lemmy hardly remembered Elon exists.
Well there’s still the slight difference that Trump was the president of the most powerful nation in the world and Elon is a random tech bro. If you don’t drive Tesla nor use Twitter or Star Link then what ever Elon does has virtually zero effect on you life. You’d be surprised of how insignificant person he is outside this bubble. Most normal people pay no attention to him as they shouldn’t.
Tell that to the Ukranian soldiers who had their Starlink access cut off during a critical moment in the war with Russia or to the people injured/killed by Tesla's half-baked autopilot that Elon refuses to admit is not safe for public use, both of which are decisions spearheaded by Elon, directly.
They had previously had access, and then were denied further access by geofencing critical regions. That's effectively the same as having services cut off.
Isaacson writes that Musk reportedly panicked when he heard about the planned Ukrainian attack, which was using Starlink satellites to guide six drones packed with explosives towards the Crimea coast.
After speaking to the Russian ambassador to the United States — who reportedly told him an attack on Crimea would trigger a nuclear response — Musk took matters into his own hands and ordered his engineers to turn off Starlink coverage “within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.”
This caused the drones to lose connectivity and wash “ashore harmlessly,” effectively sabotaging the offensive mission.
Ukraine’s reaction was immediate: Officials frantically called Musk and asked him to turn the service back on, telling him that the “drone subs were crucial to their fight for freedom.”
They had access. Musk revoked it from the Crimea region after the fact.
Isaacson, the biographer, issued his own clarification on Sept. 8, acknowledging that Starlink was not enabled in Crimea in the first place:
To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.
Oh boy, if Elon Musk has trouble dealing with regulators and oversight agencies when managing his car company or his social media company, imagine what a wakeup call it’s going to be when he wants to start dealing with banking regulators. 0% chance he doesn’t run afoul of them in the first year trying to run his business by the seat of his pants like he does with all the others.
Yet another half-baked idea to spill out of the mouth of this fucking moron with too much money for his own good.
Right wing control of Twitter was always my hypothesis, since, as people have pointed out, Twitter gave regular people access to people with influence. Destroying Twitter destroys that access, but it was more valuable as a tool to manufacture consent, like most media.
think about it, trump is a godlike business man despite failing numerous times at all his businesses. he loses the election people still think he won. caught with nuclear codes giving them to enemy intelligence? it was probably a librul framing him.
if x goes under people will say it’s part of musk’s master plan
Been saying that for a while now too. The people bankrolling him; Saudi Arabia and Russia, have a vested interest in seeing Twitter burn after the Arab Spring organized around it, and Ukraine found so much support on the platform. The thing is, he can’t directly run it into the ground without lawsuits so he’s doing it piece by piece.
Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete on why this does not make any sense.
When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that. 2. He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason? 3. If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging? 4. If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.
Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.
Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.
It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.
Could have been both, twitter gets messed with enough to drive off normal people and musk gets to rebuild it from the ground up afterwards using what ever is left or they knew musk would be poison to twitter and let him just have fun with it
“I’m sorry but i just sacrificed a very expensive social media just to get some quet time”
I have no idea why the idea of twitter being the meat-filled pumpkin they threw into Musk’s enclosure to keep him busy cracks me up so hard, it just does
Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.
This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.
It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.
Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don’t see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.
Prediction: He’s going to try to pay his employees in Xits: Your going to negotiate a salary based on a floating exchange rate with a new cryptocurrency and then when it starts to tank he will refuse to renegotiate based on the fact that its headed for the moon!
As someone who worked for a tech banking company many years, you are too stupid to do it.
This shit is complicated as fuck.
Oh and all the tech in the world or capital you could build is worthless unless you have that sweet banking / credit license in US. And lets just say its really really hard to cone by nowadays.
Oh please. It ain’t complicated. I could write a ruby app in a weekend that would do everything a bank does. It’s just subtracting from one account and adding to another.
There is literally prior art from him in this regard. He just decided to call it a payment processor so he did not have to do all that bit about it being other people’s money.
Elmo’s single letter “X” is almost unfilterable on some apps… Adding a space before/after can help with accidentally blocking more content to some extent but it’s a big ooof situation
I think he originally wanted to purchase the platform during the crypto boom in order to use it to add crypto nft Doge features and then the crypto market crashed and then he changed his mind about buying it but he was contractually obligated so he bought it and ruined it and now he’s going to start a bank run on toilet sentence
His first garbage idea. He’s super nostalgic for X the platform her merged with PayPal to become super wealthy especially after the people that knew what they were doing had to pay him to leave.
Literally the same concept, name and everything. It’s like he thinks he can just start over at the first app and it just will be propped up by a corpse. Idiot.
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