Musk wants to transform X into an ‘everything app.’ With a recent partnership with Visa, progressing his plan for an upcoming payment service XMoney, this is the first step for Musk to achieve his goal. He is only getting started with a long road ahead of him to develop the ‘everything app’.

X’s chief executive officer, Yaccarino, announced on Tuesday that ‘Visa is our first partner for the XMoney Account, which will debut later this year.’ The new feature will allow for ‘instant funding […] via Visa Direct,’ and enable peer-to-peer transactions. This is ‘another milestone for the everything app.’ Visa confirmed, in a post on Tuesday, that XMoney will be powered by Visa Direct.

Visa confirmed, in a post on Tuesday, that XMoney will be powered by Visa Direct.

Musk’s vision can be traced back to 1999 when he co-founded an American online bank named X.com, which later merged with Confinity to become Paypal in 2001. The X.com domain was then used for Twitter from 2023, after being purchased by Musk in 2022. Consequently,the domain is now referred to as X as of 2023.

Musk was inspired by Chinese platform WeChat to create the ‘everything app,’ which incorporates instant messaging, social media, dating and mobile payments. Founded in 2011, WeChat originated as a simple messaging app, but has now evolved into a ‘super app’ that Musk seeks to emulate. Musk claimed in March 2023 that X could ‘become the biggest financial institution in the world.’ He aims to achieve this with the development of XMoney.

Whether an ‘everything app’ will work in the West as well as it does in China is a contested question. WeChat’s success in China is partially due to most people accessing the platform through their smartphones instead of computers, as a result of the late development of the internet in the country. Additionally, the lack of competition regulation in China allows apps like WeChat to obstruct rival apps.

Whether an ‘everything app’ will work in the West as well as it does in China is a contested question.

In the US, payment service apps, such as Venmo and PayPal dominate the field of peer-to-peer transactions, lessening the attraction XMoney may have. Moreover, the West is attempting to prohibit the emergence of super apps, unlike WeChat which has support from the Chinese Government. The 2022 Digital Markets Act, introduced by the EU, forced tech giants (including Meta, Google and Apple) to explain to smaller rivals how their products work, in order to gain more access to their users.

Therefore, it seems unconvincing that Musk’s ‘everything app’ will manifest without breaching present and future laws, thus not reaching his desired outcome.

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