“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.”
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…
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
I go on twitter now and 3/4 of adverts are AI scams or 2009 click bait with fuckin community notes explaining that remembering a set of politicians names is not linked to hi iq, as claimed by the clickbait advert.
Then there is the ‘verified’ accounts that are doing genuine harm at misinformation spread.
Yeah I’m not trusting ol musky chuckles with my money. And that’s coming from someone who uses traditional banks despite having witnessed their government bail out banks multiple times after they were fucking reckless to the point of needing a bailout.
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