What Is Elon Musk’s X App?
Twitter owner Elon Musk said one of the reasons he bought Twitter was to speed up the creation of an everything app, or super app, called X.What exactly would the X app look like?
What Is X, Elon Musk’s Everything App?
An everything app is asuper app, or an app of apps. It aggregates services that you would otherwise need several apps to carry out. Basically, you get access to everything you need with just one password and one user interface.
Musk has not elaborated on what his everything app X would look like, but financial services would likely be at the core of it. After all, the domain X.com was once a fintech company which eventually became PayPal. Musk has also spoken fondly about China’s super app WeChat and wants Twitter to be like WeChat. He has said:
You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success.
WeChat,which the Trump administration unsuccessfuly tried to ban alongside TikTok, offers messaging, video calls, online payments, food delivery, government services, and other features.Business Insiderreports that WeChat is so useful in China that it has come pretty close to its goal of being involved in “every moment of the user’s daily life, from morning till night, anytime, anywhere.”
How Would Musk Use Twitter to Accelerate the X Everything App?
Musk has previously flirted with creating a Tesla phone. Also, Tesla customers can pay with the Dogecoin cryptocurrency for merchandise. Perhaps the future of the X app is that you cannot access Twitter unless you download the X app.
Or maybe your Twitter interface gets new X buttons, which serve as a gateway for Twitter users into the world of X. Maybe that world is even a metaverse.
Maybe Twitter, or X, also gets embedded in a future Tesla phone, allowing you to control your Tesla vehicle and pay for Tesla services such as supercharging and software upgrades in Dogecoin. Perhaps X also allows you to pay for Starlink internet and access any other goods and services that Musk’s business empire offers.
Musk could also buy out other apps and add them to the world of X. Or he could go into partnerships with folks such as Uber, Lyft, Venmo, and Grubhub or a crypto exchange. Assuming Twitter’s over 200 million daily active users are already in the world of X, there would be a ready market for these other apps in there, which would perhaps make a partnership attractive to them.
Obstacles Musk’s X App Faces
Musk faces at least two challenges in his ambition to create the X super app for the US and the world.
1. Stiff Competition
Other big tech players such as Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Venmo, Snapchat, Uber, and Google are also interested in becoming super apps, and have actually tried with limited success. Americans are used to having many apps, so it is hard to imagine the X app muscling into other app domains successfully.
AsTechCrunchnotes:
It’s unlikely that tech businesses like Amazon, Uber, Facebook and Square would want to join a hypothetical X super app, considering that they already have a stronghold in their sectors and control over user data.
2. Government Regulations
The US government, the European Union, and China have beeninvestigating and cracking down hard on big tech. There are rumors out there of a move to break up dominant firms such as Facebook. Musk is likely to face political and legal resistance should he attempt to use his financial muscle to build X into a dominant global big tech platform.
Let Twitter Be Twitter
Twitter is a place for conversations; humanity’s global public square. Though Twitter has far fewer users than its far bigger rivals, it punches far above its weight in influencing the world.
The answer to its many problems is not to make it an online marketplace. Rather it is to make it do less, but do it better and safer. Let Twitter be Twitter.
However, there’s nothing to stop Musk from building X as a separate app.
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