Twitter has started seeking regulatory licenses through the US and making the software essential to implement payment systems in social media networks.
As per two people familiar with the company's plans, Esther Crawford, a rapidly ascending lieutenant of Elon Musk at Twitter, has started to outline the architecture necessary to allow payments on the site with a small team.
A fundamental module of Musk's strategy to generate new profit sources is the initiative to accept payments over the website.
As part of a more comprehensive strategy to introduce an "everything app" that merges payments, messaging, and commerce, Elon Musk has declared that he wants Twitter to offer fintech services like savings accounts, peer-to-peer transactions, and debit cards. Musk co-established the online bank X.com in 1999. X.com eventually merged with PayPal payments.
Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App
Project X
Musk confessed in August of 2022 that he had "a greater vision for what I felt X.com or X Corporation could have been back in the day," although it was unclear what that splendid vision was.
During Tesla's yearly shareholder conference, he said:
“It is a pretty grand vision. And noticeably, that might be started from scratch. But Twitter would help speed up that by three to five years.”
He gave other details at that time.
At the height of the early dotcom fizz in early 1999, Musk co-established an online bank, the original X.com. Zip2 was Musk's first project and had lately been sold to Compaq for $300 million.
Musk, multimillionaire, put $12 million, or the bulk of after-tax Zip2 sale earnings, into X.com. Ultimately, he saw it evolving into a one-stop store for financial services, including brokerage, insurance services, and consumer bank accounts.
A year later, X.com and its rival Confinity united, and in 2001, the business embraced the name PayPal. Musk made approximately $180 million when it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, allowing him the resources to invest in the electric car startup Tesla and found his rocket firm, SpaceX.
Musk has previously declared that he trusts X.com was a wasted opportunity to become "the core hub wherever all transactions happen." He even considering "trying toward getting PayPal back" to his biography writer Ashlee Vance.
In Vance's 2015 biography, Musk is quoted as saying,
“If all your financial activities are perfectly integrated one spot, it is incredibly straightforward to execute transactions, and the transaction fees are cheap. Why are not doing this? It is crazy.”
Currently, PayPal has taken more aggressive paces to develop into a "super-app" for payments. But Musk's plan to merge X.com and Twitter appears to go even further.
In a pitch deck offered to investors this year, Musk summarized his vision for Twitter, which included adding the capability for users to make payments to one another in the way of PayPal and decreasing advertising in favor of charging several users a membership fee. By 2028, he expected more than 100 million clients to subscribe to X.
Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App
Moving Onward
As per two people familiar with the team's work, Crawford's team at Twitter is developing, including making a vault for securing and storing the user data that the system would collect.
Moreover, Twitter is moving onward with the legal confirmations required before declaring a payment service. As per a regulatory filing, Twitter was listed as a payment processor with US Treasury in November. According to these sources, it had moreover started to apply for several state licenses it would need to operate.
One of the individuals stated that the remaining documentation would be filed soon with the expectation that US licensing would be finished within a year. Afterward, they continued, the business would look to develop by gaining regulatory permissions overseas.
Before Elon Musk took over the business, Twitter had founded a subsidiary named Twitter Payments LLC in August of 2022. Musk just called Crawford, Twitter's director of product management, as Twitter Payments' CEO.
But to appreciate Musk's vision, we must confront new technological hurdles, heavy regulatory charges, and eroded public confidence.
To gain more money, Musk reportedly approached Twitter's equity investors. As per one investor who obtained the offer, Musk stated that several of the funds would be used to finance a "contracting binge" of programmers to make a "super app" that might handle payments.
Before Elon Musk took over, Twitter had been looking on several payment abilities related to tipping creators & e-commerce.
As per three people acquainted with the plans, Musk's desire goes far outside that and includes looking into more ways for users to pay other users directly, reward artists straight through the network, and buy goods instantly.
Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App
Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App-Twitter now wants to turn into a Payment App
