Elon Musk Vies to Turn X Into Super App With Banking Tool Near Launch (theedgesingapore.com)
- Reference: 0182964006
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/26/2155259/elon-musk-vies-to-turn-x-into-super-app-with-banking-tool-near-launch
- Source link: https://www.theedgesingapore.com/news/tech/musk-vies-turn-x-super-app-banking-tool-near-launch
> 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... Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases and a 6% interest rate on cash savings — the latter of which is roughly 15 times the national average. Musk's new product is also expected to offer free peer-to-peer transfers, a metal Visa debit card personalised 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... 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... 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. Some have already been testing X Money to send payments to one another through the app's chat feature or directly through their profiles, according to early participants in the rollout...
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> X currently holds licences in 44 states, according to its website, and likely won't be able to operate in states where it hasn't obtained a licence.
[1] https://www.theedgesingapore.com/news/tech/musk-vies-turn-x-super-app-banking-tool-near-launch
This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't imagine how Musk* is still unaware of this, but - he's not just unlikable, over the past ~ two years he's managed to actively poison how at least half of Americans view him. I frankly can't see how he'll ever recover from that - MAGA types will certainly continue to support him, but his circle of influence is gonna be rather constrained.
*(side note) or the Tesla board, for that matter
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Interesting)
I just don't want the place I bank and the places I make social media posts to be one in the same. It'd be no different if it was Reddit or Facebook, my money belongs far away from the reach of where I express my opinions.
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:4, Interesting)
I am right in step with you on that - I wouldn't personally do it regardless of who was leading the charge.
But, honestly, I don't think most people think that way. If Musk had stayed in the background, this might've actually had a chance of succeeding.
(Also I see that I managed to piss off a Musk fanboi with mod points haha)
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think of it as a means of controlling what people say.
Criticize the wrong nation state? No money for seven days.
But, ohh, that sweet sweet 5% interest rate.
These people actually upload their biometrics to foreign nation states to get a "reply boost".
Re: (Score:3)
and absolutely nothing I do to have anything to do with Elon Musk, except champion his deportation.
So this is about Tesla stock (Score:4, Interesting)
SpaceX too. In the public consciousness we all kind of mix muskrats companies together into one big slurry. The fact that the companies often exchange resources in a way that is not strictly legal encourages that.
So if you're starting to wonder whether or not Tesla's 7 year old car platform technology is going to be able to compete when Elon just took a Payday in the tens of billions of dollars or if you watched Patrick Boyle's video on SpaceX IPO and you know it's a scam now this kind of stuff is there to put your mind at ease with the idea that there's a entire another line of business Elon can make billions off of and protect your investment with.
It's basically a branding exercise leading up to a pump and dump. The cybertruck was the same way. Remember when it was going to be a $40,000 electric truck with a 500 MI range?
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> So if you're starting to wonder whether or not Tesla's 7 year old car platform technology is going to be able to compete
Nah, I stopped wondering when it was revealed that the 4D chess move was the Iran war running gas prices through the roof. That improved the economics of buying one of Musk's cars, significantly. For all the "swasticar" talk, it's not as if buying gasoline supports a nicer sort of oligarchs.
> The cybertruck was the same way. Remember when it was going to be a $40,000 electric truck with a 500 MI range?
The Cybertruck is a toy for people with more money than taste, as [1]whatever this is supposed to be [cars.com] demonstrates. That just turned out to be a much smaller market demographic than Tesla was betting on. Disney made exac
[1] https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/3fddc051-7335-4151-a523-b80baf6e4b7a/
Re: (Score:3)
"it's not as if buying gasoline supports a nicer sort of oligarchs."
This is known as a false choice. It is also incorrect, buying gasoline does, in fact, support a nicer sort of oligarchs. There is no more malignant sociopath than Elon Musk, except possibly your other hero, Donald Trump.
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> This is known as a false choice.
Because there are other EV makes besides Tesla? Well, yeah, but most of those alternatives would be compliance cars or wouldn't exist at all without Tesla having first demonstrated that there was a larger market for EVs than the established automakers originally believed. The company that produced the EV I own today (a Chevy Bolt) had previously [1]shelved their attempt at an EV. [wikipedia.org]
Now personally, I wouldn't buy a Tesla, but that's mostly down to some of their baffling UI choices and pricing, rather than how I
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:4, Insightful)
Musk is a really, really bad businessperson that got lucky once. He is also not very smart and not well educated. But at this tike he is part of a cabal that tries to subjugate free society and get filthy rich in the process. And they have not (yet) dropped him.
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
I've recently been looking into India's digital payment system, Unified Payment Interface(UPI). It seems so good in so many ways. Direct INSTANT payments, person to person or merchant. Free! It really seems like the best system I've seen so far.
But, when I look at implementing such a system in America, I start to realize that credit cards offer features that India's system lacks. Buyer protection is one such feature. I can easily roll back a credit charge. It's vastly superior to direct bank debits.
Sure, the credit card system has caused price inflation as the ~3% that merchants have to pay is built into the price of goods. But that money is never coming back to the consumer. Even if the 3% is eliminated, the merchants will still charge the same and enjoy higher margins.
I guess that an instant digital system, like India's, is still vastly better than our present system of slow-ass cheques, debit cards, and ACH transfers. There's no reason why we can't have both a digital cash system and credit cards.
I'm hoping that Elon's system gives us the best of both worlds. But, I fully expect greedy fucks to turn it into just another consumer fleecing piece of shit.
Re: (Score:2)
> Direct INSTANT payments, person to person or merchant. Free!
Isn't that basically what Zelle is? The main issue with electronic payments in the USA is that there is no single universal standard and you basically have to ask someone what they're able to accept before sending. Personally, I prefer Apple Pay.
If someone tells me the only way they can accept digital funds is through X, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
> ...electronic payments in the USA ...
>> Yep, you've identified the problem: Banking systems in other countries are creating a national standard (like India did) for person-to-person transfers that doesn't depend on account numbers.
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There will probably never be a single electronic payment method. Just like we don't have a single national bank, nor a single national credit card. At best maybe these electronic payment platforms will standardize on a method of interoperability between their platforms like we have with the different credit and debit cards all working on the same payment terminal.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Credit cards are not a good idea. The vast majority of the population would just misuse them, as can be seen in every country around the world. For those people, credit cards are a source of unnecessary debt.
Buyer protection can be implemented in law, no need for a credit card. Don't conflate the two ideas, the protection is merely a carrot to entice people onto credit cards.
With a cash system, provided it clearly displays the wallet's current balance, people are better able to judge when they've run o
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Elon's sytem can never be that because the whole idea with India's system is it was built and mostly operated by a [1]State-Owned-Enterprise. [wikipedia.org] so is not really a profit taking business, it's there to facilitate transactions and thus provide a service for all the rest of the profit seeking economy.
Payment processing as is structured here in the US is a form of rent-seeking and thus an economic drag. There's a good case to be made for standardizing it the way India has even if it does come with challenges and drawbacks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Payments_Corporation_of_India
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Yes functionally it is really good but, much like the [1]Aadhaar [wikipedia.org] biometric ID system, the direction of travel is that it becomes so ubiquitous you are more or less forced to use it.
In a country where you actually have things like rule of law, separation of powers, freedom of speech and assembly, this might be ok. But both Aadhaar and UPI are moving towards [2]'data maximization' [scroll.in] and user profiling at govt/state level, with your spending and service utilization data being shared with an opaque group of [3]favored providers [ndtvprofit.com].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar
[2] https://scroll.in/article/1045536/are-your-upi-payments-farming-your-personal-data-without-your-consent
[3] https://www.ndtvprofit.com/business/upis-dominance-by-few-threatens-indias-financial-inclusion-future-9962407
X + Musk + MyBanking? (Score:3)
No thank you.
That is all.
Your money is TOTALLY safe in X (Score:3)
Surely, there's no need to worry about the safety of storing your money in X, even though Musk's previous Y2K-era x.com [1]permitted customers for almost a month to transfer funds from any other account in the nation's banking system [archive.org]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140817020043/https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/28/business/security-flaw-discovered-at-online-bank.html
Re:Your money is TOTALLY safe in X (Score:4, Funny)
At least if it's an actual bank theoretically you would have FDIC insurance and a whole bunch of other regulations backing you up.
What I'm wondering is if they are going to do this as a dodgy pseudobank. Like a lot of those money transfer services that aren't technically Banks but function as Banks and therefore are very much illegal but you know, it's an app so it's legal now.
It will never cease to amaze me how much you can get away with just by calling it an app. Like, we're not an assassin's guild we're a technology platform!
Re: (Score:3)
The argument will be that its not a bank, (I mean, who wants to trust those things?), and the money is merely travelling in a conveyance
Re: (Score:3)
> The argument will be that its not a bank
100%. They will fight tooth and nail to not be considered a bank (and therefore not have to be regulated as one). Though, really, at this point in the game of US politics, even if they do try to regulate it, he can surely just offer a "donation" to kill any potential enforcement - or even kill the regulation itself.
More pump and dump (Score:3)
The banking sector is incredibly competitive and Elon doesn't really have anything to offer it special. The only underserved market out there is the unbanked and people have tried to make money off of them before and it never works out. On paper you should be able to make a lot of money off of them because there are so many desperate people on the fringes in America and even in Europe but in practice there are already services that take advantage of those people much better than anything Elon could hope to do. In theory you could offer them a better product but in practice you just get out competed by better crooks.
But this will briefly get a bunch of people excited and help Elon raise some extra money. It'll help keep the Tesla stock price up because a lot of people think of anything Elon does as being Tesla. Which isn't that far off because he repeatedly and routinely mixes his companies and ways that are very illegal but well, we stopped and forcing laws a long time ago. I'm sure that's fine.
Now if you excuse me this guy named Chesterton has a fence he wants taken down.
I know better (Score:4, Interesting)
Phones can be lost, stolen, and hacked. My phone has never seen a single credit card number, nor have I ever logged in to any bank with it. Letting any app have access to my money is never going to happen. I know my home pc can be hacked, but it's a linux box; I know what's going on with my home network and all the devices on it. Not so for phones. I'd say Elon can kiss my ass, but he'd have to pay me a LOT to do that. Eeeewww.
Re: (Score:2)
I use a dedicated laptop for banking and it's only turned on for banking then shutdown and it doesn't have anything else on it. No browsing or anything else is done on it.
Re: (Score:2)
Dang, you don't use single-use burner laptops for banking? Careless! Mine are gold-plated.
Processing fee (Score:2)
Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases
That's about the same as merchant fees, meaning the transactions themselves are probably a loss leader once you factor in all the stuff like fraud and dispute resolution.
I'm guessing Musk sees the real value as the dataset of shopping behaviours. Either that or that cash back rate is going to plummet once the service gets established.
Almost certainly a disadvantage (Score:2)
for anyone who uses X for everything. Why?: A walled garden where the services cost more than if you sought them out on your own.
The only way prices are kept under control is if there is a broad market for products and services being offered.Once that is walled off you will only have the choices offered in the walled garden unless you want to do business outside of the app. Musk is betting nost people will be gullible enough not to notice, and/or won't care.
Musk is isn't the first or last person to attempt
UH-oh (Score:1)
Does any of this involve injecting a chip labeled with "666" under the user's skin? Asking for a friend...
Too little, too late (Score:2)
Musk has been promoting X being an everything app (including banking) since 2022. While some will certainly consider using the X bank, it is unlikely convince many to migrate from their current solution in any large numbers.
Hmmm (Score:1)
Just curious. Does that 6% savings interest come with a clause that says he owns your money and doesn't have to give it back, like facebutt does with your photos?
So... (Score:3)
As the saying goes: Jack of all trades, master of none.
Digital company town (Score:1)
Musk is trying to build a digital company town and this is its company store. Nothing against Musk trying new things, but *I* am not interested in trying this.
aka (Score:3)
WeChat clone
Re: (Score:2)
6 percent is peanuts
Re: aka (Score:2)
Not for FDIC-insured funds.
Surely this is a loss-leader. Expect the rug to be pulled.
Re: (Score:3)
6% APR for an FDIC backed savings account is actually really good. Most US banks do not currently offer more than the fed funds rate, which is currently 3 1/2%.
His backing bank is probably going to lose a bunch of money by offering rates like this, which makes me think that's going to be a "promotional" rate that goes away quickly.
As anyone who's bought an early Tesla Model 3 with "Full Self Driving" knows, it's that Elon isn't afraid of making big promises and never making good on them.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct 6% would be about 50% more than typical 4% rates now. BUT, big BUT, it is not a bank, and the backing bank is not going to cover you if there is a problem. you are NOT FDIC insured. There was a similar "bank" I think in Tennessee a couple years ago that had some issue. The depositors lost their money. The backing bank said not our problem. And it wasn't. It may be fine with X, but if you drop say 50 grand into it thinking you are going to get 6% and insured against failure, think again.
Re: (Score:1)
According to [1]Yahoo Finance [yahoo.com] this is incorrect.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/personal-finance/banking/article/x-money-elon-musks-fintech-app-130000383.html
Re: (Score:2)
> His backing bank is probably going to lose a bunch of money by offering rates like this, which makes me think that's going to be a "promotional" rate that goes away quickly.
I suspect there will be some limitations and/or requirements to the 6% rate... kind of like T-Mobile Money has a limit to it's "higher than average" interest rate (it's 4% for the first $3k and 2.5% beyond that). So if you have more than $3k in there, you're actually getting less than a good HYSA will give you. I'm not sure if they still do, but T-Mobile also had other requirements to even qualify for the 4% rate (like a minimum number of debit transactions per month, last I recall).
Re: (Score:3)
> WeChat clone
Yes... like is specifically called out in the OP already.
I have similar thoughts about this kind of service as I do Tesla's someday "robotaxi" service... who is going to use it but a limited number of diehard fanboys? There's no way it becomes a de-facto anything if such a large portion of the population hates you and refuses to use any of your services or give you money. He might have had a chance 4-5 years ago before he REALLY went off the deep end... but now? No fucking way.
Re: (Score:2)
> I have similar thoughts about this kind of service as I do Tesla's someday "robotaxi" service... who is going to use it but a limited number of diehard fanboys?
People rent those Lime and Bird scooters and you can easily eat shit on them if you're not careful. If Tesla manages to make the service cost competitive with that (and no, the scooters aren't all that cheap to rent these days), they're in like Flynn. There's something to be said for being able to get out of the elements and not having to worry that an errant curb is going to send you to the ER.
Also, the average cost of a new car has been creeping up and it's not as if the US is becoming any less car-cent
Re: (Score:2)
Makes perfect sense to compare a driverless taxi service to scooters rather than conventional taxis. It's almost as if you have an agenda.
Re: (Score:2)
> Makes perfect sense to compare a driverless taxi service to scooters rather than conventional taxis.
The "conventional taxies" ship sailed when Uber and Lyft hit the scene. Anybody who has been paying attention knew the human drivers are only part of a transitionary phase until the rideshare companies can figure out how to automate the driving part.
And I know from your sig that you think the technology will never work. Well, I remember a time not too long ago when the idea of running a search on my phone's photo library for "cat photos" sounded like impossible science fiction, too. In case I'm not makin
Re: aka (Score:5, Insightful)
Hating Elon Musk is not partisan politics. These days only loving Elon Musk is.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, well, that's the USA out, then.
Re: (Score:3)
> People who don't make all of life's decisions based on partisan politics.
If hating nazis and making choices to not fund their nonsense is "partisan politics" ... then sign me up!
And honestly, that's before you consider all of the lies and delays and missed deadlines and shifted goalposts of his entire "robotaxi" concept that may never actually happen at scale.