Elon Musk’s back-and-forth plan to buy Twitter for $44 billion seemed like an impulsive move by the richest person in the world.
But the Tesla and SpaceX chairman now insists the transaction is part of a master plan to launch an all-in-one app, incorporating messaging, payments and commerce, which he has been developing for more than two decades.
“Buying Twitter is an accelerator to build X, the app of everything,” Musk tweeted Tuesday after his lawyers informed the social media company that he planned to complete the acquisition at the original price of $54. .20 (R$ 282) per share. The deal is conditional on obtaining financing and ending the bitter legal battle that Musk had been fighting for months in order to walk away from the acquisition.
Since making his original offer on Twitter in April, Musk has been saying that controlling Twitter was more a matter of preserving the platform as an open space for “free speech” — and also solving the site’s spam problems, that apparently annoy Musk, a very frequent user—than an attempt to make money.
However, in recent months Musk has hinted that he had a bigger plan for Twitter: to turn it into the backbone of a WeChat-style “super app” that would function as an operating system for people’s digital lives.
The “X” mentioned in Tuesday’s tweet appears to be a reference to X.com, Musk’s second startup, which would later become PayPal. In 2017, Musk bought back the domain name X.com, which was owned by PayPal. “No plans yet,” Musk tweeted at the time, “but [o domÃnio] It has great sentimental value to me.”
But Musk revealed in August that he actually had “a bigger vision of what I imagined X.com or X Corporation might have been in the past.”
“It’s a pretty grandiose vision. And obviously I could have started the project from scratch,” he told Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting, without elaborating on what exactly the plan entailed. “But I think Twitter would help accelerate it by three to five years.”
The original X.com was one of the first online banks, which Musk co-founded in early 1999, the height of the original internet bubble. Musk’s first startup, Zip2, an online directory of local businesses, had just been sold to Compaq for more than $300 million.
Newly transformed into a multimillionaire, Musk invested $12 million — most of the money he made from the sale of Zip2, including taxes — in creating X.com. He predicted that in the future the company would become a one-stop shop for financial services, from bank accounts for individuals to brokerage and insurance services.
A year later, X.com merged with rival Confinity, and in 2001, the company was rebranded as PayPal. When it was sold to eBay for US$1.5 billion in 2002, Musk earned about US$180 million, which gave him the financial firepower to continue to to invest in electric car startup Tesla and to build its rocket company, SpaceX.
But over the years, Musk has suggested that he saw X.com as a missed opportunity to create “the central place where all transactions happen.” He told his biographer Ashlee Vance that he had even considered “trying to get PayPal back”.
“If all a person’s financial affairs are perfectly integrated [em] one place, it’s very easy to transact and the fees associated with transactions are low,” Musk reportedly said, according to Vance’s biography, which came out in 2015. [o PayPal] aren’t they doing it? It’s crazy.”
Recently, PayPal has taken more ambitious steps to become a payments “super app”. But Musk’s concept of merging Twitter with X.com seems to go even further.
A presentation to investors earlier this year outlined Musk’s vision for Twitter, including creating PayPal-style peer-to-peer payment services and cutting back on advertising in favor of selling subscriptions to some users. He projected that over a hundred million users would subscribe to the X service by 2028.
“In China, people basically live on WeChat,” Musk told Twitter employees at a company-wide meeting in June, before he tried to walk away from the business. “If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a big hit.”
Musk is not the first US tech entrepreneur to try to recreate a WeChat-style super-app that fuses social media and commerce outside of China.
Mark Zuckerberg, the president of Meta, strove to turn Facebook Messenger into a platform for gaming, payments and shopping, while Snap’s Evan Spiegel also tried to take WeChat as the basis for Snapchat, through applets. But neither has been as successful as WeChat, which dominates China’s internet with more than 1.2 billion users.
Today, visitors to X.com will only see a blank page showing a tiny letter X. But if Musk’s word is to be trusted — and the entrepreneur’s mischievous side makes that difficult — maybe one day the service will become too most.
Recreating X.com is “something I thought would come in very handy a long time ago,” Musk said in August. “I know what to do… I think it will be something very useful to the world.”
He added, “I use Twitter a lot. It’s not like I go around wanting to randomly acquire companies or anything.”
Translation by Paulo Migliacci
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