His vision is to turn it into a bank. He talked about this with Baron's last year. The part of the "everything app" he actually cares about is banking. His goal is to make it into the world's largest bank. He actually said so.
Honestly, not a bad idea. If you are the world's richest person you might as well have a company that can actually make money.
Even if you think social graphs are the future of banking/payments, Twitter is still an... interesting... strategy. It's exactly the wrong social graph for that sort of thing.
(I also don't think that hypothesis makes a lick of sense -- Apple+Google, not any particular app, is the "WeChat of the west".)
And even if you think the Twitter social graph is the right social graph for it, it seems unlikely that the best way of converting it into a ubiquitous payment platform is to make a lot of noise about most of its user base being bots, relaunch the "verification" feature as something which has nothing to do with verification, wade into populist politics, and slash its employee base whilst panning the quality of its tech platform.
It worked well for WeChat because they were able to launch a feature at a point when there were not very strict AML requirements in China and it was much easier to get consumers and merchants onboarded compared to credit cards. I don't have any anecdotes about how often person2person payments are done on WeChat vs person2business, but I have seen it being used very frequently for p2b. If you can build a low friction app that solves a problem, people will use it.
That being said, Wechat payments are also rife with every form of scam, irreversibility, and fake QR code issues that people in the West warn about. That (and the AML stuff) is why it seems to be getting more scrutiny by the Chinese govt.
> If you can build a low friction app that solves a problem, people will use it.
For p2b, Apply Pay lets me tap my power button twice and hold it next to the payment terminal. Hard to get lower friction than that.
For p2p, the space is already saturated (Zelle, Venmo, etc.) It's unclear why I would want to use Twitter -- sorry, x -- for this in particular. Also, with the launch of FedNow, the days of new entrant intermediaries in the USA are coming to a close.
Finally, as Goldman Sachs just learned, consumer banking is a brutal business. I think the closest they got to building anything like breaking into consumer credit/banking was becoming the bank that supported the Apple-branded credit card.
But then why they aren't interested in retaining user and trust? I don't see how financial dependency works on a platform that can't stop banning high profile users. Even right now people are reporting follower losses in 2-3 digits.
Elon has become known for mandating large policy changes at Twitter. These change the way the service works, what different features mean, and how much sway different users have on the communities. By now, business owners should know not to rely on Twitter's features or community remaining unchanged beyond maybe a couple years. Which isn't terrible. It's a social media service, society is inherently messy, and messiness makes for good profit opportunities.
But who would want those qualities in a bank? Banks should be boring.
Honestly, not a bad idea. If you are the world's richest person you might as well have a company that can actually make money.