Elon Musk likes the letter “X” a lot. The musician Grimes’ son, whose real name is a combination of words and characters, is referred to as “X” by the father. He called the business he founded to acquire Twitter “X Holdings.” Naturally, his rocket firm is called SpaceX.
He now wants to change Twitter into an “everything app,” which he calls X.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has long been interested in building his international equivalent of China’s WeChat, a “super app” that enables video conversations, texting, music, and transactions.
At least until he has finished purchasing Twitter following months of legal wrangling over the US$44 billion NZ$79 billion acquisition deal, he inked in April.
There aren’t many difficulties. First, a Musk-owned Twitter will not be the only multinational corporation pursuing this objective; it would likely lag behind its competitors. Next, consider if anyone would desire a Twitter-based all-encompassing app or any other type of super software in the first place.
The competition and customer desire should come first. The company that owns Facebook, Meta, has worked for years to turn its main website into a one-stop shop for all things online, integrating dating, payments, games, and shopping into its social network. It hasn’t been very successful thus far, and advertising still accounts for most of its income.
Other companies like Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber, and others have also sought to get on the mega app wagon by increasing their features and trying to win over users’ daily lives. Since individuals already have various applications at their fingertips to manage shopping, communication, and payments, none have so far taken the globe by storm.
According to Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, old habits are difficult to change, and Americans are accustomed to utilizing many applications for various purposes.
Enberg further points out that when social platform trust substantially declines, super applications will probably gather more personal data.
On October 4, Musk reversed his attempts to get out of the transaction and declared that he intended to purchase Twitter after all. This announcement set off the most recent wave of rumors.
But in the past, he’s given at least a bit more information. Musk told the gathering at a factory outside Austin, Texas, during Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August that he believes he has “a decent notion of where to take the technical team with Twitter to make it drastically better.”
Furthermore, he has clarified that managing transactions for products and activities will be a crucial component of the program. Musk claimed to have a “grander vision” for what X.com, an online bank he founded early in his career and later joined PayPal, may have turned out to be.
Musk remarked in August that while “it could certainly be done from scratch, I think Twitter would help speed that by three to five years.” I was so kind of assumed it would be fairly helpful for a long time.
The internet behemoth Alibaba Holdings Ltd. platform has established itself as a one-stop shop for transactions and other products, and it is beginning to compete in the leisure market. It serves as a platform for health code applications that the general public must utilize to stop the coronavirus from spreading.
According to the government-approved China Internet Network Information Centre, there are 1 billion internet users in China, and almost all use their mobile phones to access the internet. Only 33% of people use desktop computers, largely as a supplement to mobile phones. WeChat, according to Tencent, has 1.3 billion users as of June.
The goal of Tencent and its primary Chinese rival, e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group, is to create applications with so many features that consumers find it difficult to switch to another. Not everyone is like them.
Along with retail, recreation, and other activities, WeChat has incorporated video calls and other communication functions. Health, traffic, and other messages are sent out via it by government organizations.
Meanwhile, WeChat’s payment feature is so extensively utilized that coffee shops, museums, and similar establishments reject accepting cash and will only accept payments through WeChat or the competing Ant app. Despite attempts made by software businesses, there isn’t an equivalent app in the US.
It’s important to remember that Musk’s lofty ambitions don’t always materialize as he seems to anticipate. His projected fleet of robotaxis is still about as distant from reality as the metaverse, and humans are still far from colonizing Mars.
Compared to its rival social media platforms, Twitter has a very small user base. Twitter has roughly 240 million daily users, but Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok surpassed the 1 billion user milestone long ago.
Enberg stated that Musk would not only have to persuade users to modify their online behavior but also that Twitter is the best platform to do it.
