 The social media site, formerly known as Twitter, recently had its first all-hands meeting since Elon Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino to the position of CEO within the company. So with these meetings, it's usually an opportunity for the executives to discuss things with all of the employees about the direction that the company is going to be going in. And one of the new directions that were discussed is Twitter is going to start going down the path of financial services. That's right! Elon's dream from the late 90s of starting an online bank can now start becoming a reality. And this time, there isn't some stuffy executive in a suit and tie that's there to bully pre-billionaire Elon into naming it something boring like PayPal. It's probably going to be called X Bank, like it's a financial institution for comic book villains or something like that. And if Elon's plans actually come to fruition, then X is going to be a lot more than just a bank because he thinks X can actually take over half of the world's global financial system, which means you'd have to be able to trade securities through X, like stocks, options, investment contracts, and possibly even crypto, which is kind of funny because there's already a crypto project called X Bank, so if Twitter gets into the fake internet money business, these guys are probably going to join the long lines of company that are suing Twitter for copyright infringement with the X name and the X logo. But anyway, the site, formerly known as Twitter, trying to become a financial institution is really part of this bigger picture of Twitter becoming an everything app. Remember, that was one of Elon's initial goals when he first started taking over the platform. He specifically said that he wanted Twitter to become something more like WeChat and actually he wanted to go beyond what WeChat and other similar everything apps have done in places like China. So if you're not familiar with WeChat, the about section on its Play Store listing is actually pretty accurate by saying, it's more than a messaging and social media app, it's a lifestyle for over one billion users across the world. I would say that this is most true in China where the de facto way to pay for things is through WeChat. Ordering taxis, paying for plane and train tickets, that's typically done through WeChat. Even buying tickets to concerts and paying your rent and utilities and online shopping is commonly done through WeChat in China. Now there have been attempts by companies in America to try and create an app that people do everything through. And personally, I think the company that's gotten the closest to this is Facebook. And I'm not even really talking about the metaverse project, although, you know, I do consider that another attempt to build an everything app because I feel like Zuck's vision there was that we were all just going to spend all day long in the metaverse wearing these goofy goggles, working and playing in this virtual world. But I actually think that Facebook.com was the closest that we got to an everything app. So, you know, these days, Facebook.com is pretty much dead. But back in my day around, I guess, circa 2009, Facebook served the purpose of what 12 or more different apps would do these days. So it was really the only social media site that people used prior to 2010. I mean, Twitter and YouTube did exist, but they were teeny tiny companies compared to Facebook. And actually, Facebook's content algorithm was better than YouTube's was back then, at least in my opinion. And the YouTubers of old, they knew this, which is why all of them had Facebook pages. They would share their videos to Facebook. And when they did this, the, you know, there was a comment section on Facebook, there was likes and dislikes. You could consume and engage with these videos almost exclusively on Facebook. Millions of people were consuming YouTube videos through Facebook back in the day, probably without even knowing what YouTube was. And Facebook Messenger also used to be part of Facebook. And because the Messenger could be used over Wi-Fi and it didn't require a phone number, it was used as a texting alternative by a lot of people. Remember, this is back when you paid by the minute for texting. And, you know, since Facebook was the most popular social media app, it was also used as a dating app before dating apps were really a thing. It was a Craigslist alternative. It had crappy mobile games before those became a thing. It had pretty much everything except for processing, you know, payment processing that WeChat has and that Twitter is now trying to develop. But obviously, they never managed to work in that financial services part. And over the years, companies like Facebook, Google and others that make apps that do just about everything have followed this trend of splitting features out into different apps as they start developing those features more and more so that they can focus on it more within a new app. Now, obviously, going against corporate trends is kind of Elon's whole MO. But the main reason that I don't think X, the everything app is going to succeed is the circumstances that allowed WeChat to succeed just don't exist here in America or really anywhere else other than Southeast Asia. So in China, Android is the most popular mobile OS by far, but services like Google Pay, Google Maps and the Play Store are blocked in China. Even Google Search is blocked in China. And prior to WeChat filling that Google services gap, Chinese people had to rely on their phone manufacturers to create app stores, maps, payment apps, etc. And if you've ever used something like Samsung's garbage apps, you can probably get an idea of how well that worked out. Plus apps from different companies often had compatibility issues. So WeChat basically became a stand-in for Google, PayPal, Facebook, Uber and all the other big tech apps that are blocked in China, which is how we got to the point we're at now where Android and iOS are basically just glorified bootloaders for WeChat for users in mainland China. But to mimic that success in the free world, Elon is going to have to actually beat out the competition. He's got to do ride sharing better than Uber and Lyft. He's got to do social media better than Facebook and he's got to do banking better than the banks. And by the way, FedNow, which started back in July, is going to be a major hurdle for both new and existing payment processing apps because that program is supposed to allow banks here in Burgerland to do instantaneous money transfers. You know, here it takes about three to five business days to send and receive money through the banks, which is part of what contributed to PayPal's success in the first place. And finally, some of the changes that Elon has made to Twitter, like restricting its API access, has actually moved it further away from becoming an everything app in my opinion because a lot of the features that I discussed that are in WeChat are not in WeChat directly. There's this app store within WeChat where you can download these many programs, many of which are really just optimized web pages that load within WeChat. But the point is those web pages are developed by someone else who had to code it to work with WeChat's service API, which costs $99 per year to use globally or just $41 to use it locally in mainland China. Compare that to the current price of X APIs and mind you, the X API just lets you do Twitter shit right now. It doesn't even have 1% of WeChat's capabilities. So the cost of building a mini app through X, which it's going to need to implement in order to become a true everything app, is already 12 times as much as you would pay through WeChat just with the API pricing alone. And I can tell you right now, as somebody who runs an online business, I'm not going to pay this much money to integrate with X because it's just not going to be worth it for me. I mean, maybe if the price stays at $100 a month to do fiat payment processing and they charge a 0% transaction fee, then it might be worth using X instead of Stripe on base.win because Stripe takes 2.9% whenever you use your credit card there, or that's the same price for any other online store that uses Stripe. But again, that's only going to end up being worth it for stores that are consistently doing over $3,000 a month in credit card transactions. So yeah, I really think that Elon has a steep hill to climb here with creating X bank and X the everything app. And then the hill honestly keeps getting steeper as Twitter's valuation continues to plummet, especially if they want to become a financial institution. But let me know in the comments below what your thoughts are with this. Will Elon succeed with creating X the bank or will he succeed in creating an everything app? Will he even get a decent ROI on his Twitter acquisition within his lifetime? 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