“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.”
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.
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.
Musk has become erratic, irrational, and volatile. These are not conditions suitable for someone who manages other people's money. Financial institutions know this, and will not be a part of his delusions.
Yanis Varoufakis said a while back that Elon is trying to replicate China’s Wechat, which basically does all this. Owning digital platforms and having total control over them is now the best way to make money, and Elon basically wants that for everything.
I have no idea the limitations of this approach, if any, but just experienced it a few days ago. I bought something expensive online, and the timing was sensitive, else I’d lose out on a lot of money. Then I got down to the final payment. It made me really nervous and would have reconsidered if I knew about it, but the final payment could only be done through bank transfer, but they wouldn’t let me provide the standard routing and account numbers. They had a web app that brings up your banking app, has you login to that, and appears to scrape data. They were able to see my accounts and balances, as well as initiate the transfer. This was so scary, exactly like I’d expect malware to be.
Bviously I changed my passwords immediately and verified there was only one transaction and exactly as I’d expect. However yes, they controlled my bank8ng without being a bank and without any apparent cooperation from my bank. All it takes is normalizing the behavior that will get us all robbed of all we own
In Germany there is this company called Sofortüberweisung. They are the exact thing you described. The “pro” for the consumer is, that the transfer is directly confirmed by the third party and the seller can ship right away. The con is that now Sofortüberweisung has your whole banking history of the last 3 months. They will sell this data to their “partners” and make good money with it. If you don’t have a credit card, that’s one of the only ways to pay fast directly if you don’t want to use PayPal.
Maybe they are talking about that defunct bank that eventually became PayPal? Apparently Musk got booted from CEO position less than a year past launch.
That’s actually pretty genius, if he’d be able to pull that off (which he most likely can’t). Since banks can invent money out of thin air, he can pay his employees in fictional Dollars and so save a ton on employment expenses. As long as there’s no bank run, he’d be fine.
I’ve worked in financial tech (now called 'fin tech) since 1994. In the USA, We have more laws governing our banks than our food. I’ve got my popcorn to watch this…
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