Musk’s X to launch digital wallet

X partners with Visa on payment service in an effort to become an 'everything app'

NEW YORK: X is teaming up with Visa to soon offer a system for real-time payments on the social media platform — signaling some progress in a yearslong vision from billionaire owner Elon Musk to create an “everything app.”

Visa is the first partner for the platform’s “X Money Account” service, which is set to launch later this year, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a Tuesday post announcing the news. The offering, Yaccarino noted, will support an in-platform digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments connected to users’ debit cards, with an option to transfer funds to a bank account.

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According to Visa, which also posted about the partnership on X Tuesday, these services will be powered by Visa Direct — the payment giant’s instant money transferring service — and will be available to X Money Account users in the US.

Whether X Money will become available to consumers in other countries, and perhaps through additional payment partners in the near future is still known. And an exact date for the U.S. launch has also not been announced yet.

In her post on Tuesday, Yaccarino called the partnership with Visa a “milestone for the Everything App” and the “first of many big announcements about X Money this year.”

The prospect of San Francisco-based X, formerly known as Twitter, becoming an “everything app” has been floated around for some time. Before officially closing the deal to purchase the platform for $44 billion back in 2022, Musk expressed interest in creating his own version of something similar to China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments.

And his fascination with such a platform began long before the Twitter deal was on the table. Musk has been toying with the idea of an “everything app” since the late 1990s when he launched a startup called X.com that was later merged into what became X.com. He continued to push for PayPal to diversify but was rebuffed by company CEO Peter Thiel and other executives. PayPal was sold in 2002 to eBay for $1.5 billion — providing Musk with a windfall that he funneled into the creation of SpaceX and an investment in Tesla in its early days.

The landscape is far more competitive today — with a handful of companies making similar efforts to expand their in-platform offerings. Other social media giants, such as Facebook parent Meta, have added shopping, games and even dating features.

Consumers now have different platforms at their disposal for communications, payment services, entertainment and more. How X’s coming “everything” features will fare has yet to be seen. Since Musk’s 2022 takeover, the platform has already alienated many users and advertisers over reports of rising hate speech and misinformation.

X’s ambitions could also thrust the company into the crosshairs of other powerful tech giants trying to fend off a perceived competitive threat. U.S. regulators have alleged that Apple, for example, has been illegally using its market power to stifle so-called super apps from making their way onto its iPhone since 2017.

As part of an antitrust lawsuit filed last year, the U.S. Justice Department said it had uncovered evidence showing that Apple believed a super app would lessen consumers’ usage of the iPhone’s own software and services, including payment processing. The Cupertino, California, company has vehemently denied the allegations and is trying to persuade a federal judge in New Jersey to dismiss the entire case.