Musk pushing to make X an ‘everything app’ with new banking and payment platform

Elon Musk's X Holdings Corp. is evolving from a social media platform powered by mainstream advertisers to one betting on dollars generated from artificial intelligence and subscriptions, a change that appears to have buoyed its revenue lately. Photo by Gabby Jones /Bloomberg

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More than three years after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk says he’s nearing his long-stated goal of turning it into an “everything app” with a new financial services tool that he pledged to launch for the public this month.

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X Money, a banking and payments platform built inside the social network now known as X, is expected to make its early public access debut imminently, based on the timeframe offered by Musk last month. Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including three per cent cash back on eligible purchases and a six per cent interest rate on cash savings — the latter of which is roughly 15 times the national average.

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Musk’s new product is also expected to offer free peer-to-peer transfers, a metal Visa debit card personalized with a user’s X handle, and an AI concierge built by Musk’s xAI startup that tracks spending and sorts through past transactions, according to reports from users with early access.

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Musk, who first rose to prominence in Silicon Valley by co-founding PayPal Holdings Inc., sees payments as crucial to creating a so-called super app similar to social products that have flourished in China. WeChat, for example, lets users hail a ride, book a flight and pay off their credit card. As Musk told employees in February, “We want it to be such that, if you want to, you could live your life on the X app.”

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If it works, X Money would sit at the intersection of social media and finance in a way no American product has attempted at this scale. However, the super-app model has yet to take off in the U.S. Several key details about Musk’s payments project also remain unclear, including pricing, the full set of features and the date when it will be widely available.

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Musk is known for making bold promises and missing his own deadlines. In this case, he’s contending with regulatory headaches and delays: X Money still lacks payment licenses in several states including New York, where lawmakers have questioned whether the billionaire should be trusted with people’s money.

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Elon Musk. Photo by Stefani Reynolds /Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/B

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The customer rewards remain to be seen, too. Though X Money’s potential six per cent savings rate would exceed rival consumer finance services from SoFi Technologies Inc., Block Inc. and LendingClub Corp., Musk’s company has not said whether that rate is permanent or promotional. A spokesperson for X did not respond to requests for comment.

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Richard Crone, the founder of Crone Consulting LLC and an industry watcher who has tracked the payments sector for years, is skeptical of X Money’s prospects.

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“He promised this vision more than two years ago, and he said they’d have it within a year,” Crone said. “This may be a day late and a dollar short.”

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Missing features and deadlines

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Musk does have advantages few fintech founders can claim: a platform with 600 million monthly users; a captive base of content creators already being paid through X; and his own history helping to build a pioneering payments service.

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Creators who currently receive payments from X for engagement will be switched from Stripe to X Money as their payment platform, according to early users — a move that guarantees an initial base of active accounts.