Elon Musk was inspired by a new idea to launch a mysterious application called “X”, through which he aspires to be an application for everything similar to the Chinese “WeChat” application.
After announcing that the Twitter acquisition would go ahead, Musk tweeted that purchasing the Twitter platform would speed up the creation of “App X”, which would be an app for everything.
Elon Musk’s revitalized $44 billion deal to buy Twitter has sparked debate about what the US billionaire will do with the social media platform.
Musk may be alluding to the so-called “super-apps” popular in China from the likes of the Chinese tech giant Tencent.
Super applications are a term to describe an application that often acts as a one-stop shop for all needs from ordering a taxi or food through the application and at the same time works as a payments and messaging application at the same time, and this eliminates the need to have multiple applications for different functions.
The Chinese app WeChat, from Tencent, is the world’s largest “super” app, with more than a billion users.
Musk seeks to reach the number of Twitter users to at least one billion users, from 237.8 million at the moment.
The owner of Tesla and SpaceX previously expressed his admiration for WeChat during a meeting with Twitter employees last June. “I think there is an opportunity to make that happen,” he said. You mainly live on Wechat in China because it is very useful for your daily life. And I think if we can achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it will be a huge success.”
Musk thinks it will be interesting to include payments within Twitter.
(agencies)