“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
Well that sounds terrifying!
Just wait till Musk learns about banking regulations.
He’s already complaining about the EU regulations on social media, but they nothing compared to what banks have to deal with.He’s recreating Venmo. 😂
FWIW his white whale or inspiration is more like the Chinese “we do everything” apps / platforms https://wise.com/us/blog/chinese-payment-app
Without getting official government institutions on board or making the app mandatory in some way, I don’t see how this would work outside of authoritarian countries
They’re bleeding users and advertisers as it is
The Chinese super apps didn’t really have government institutions on board, aside from the chat censorship aspect which was the main thing the government was originally paying attention to. In other aspects, the Chinese government and its regulators didn’t initially get involved, and the rapid dominance of Alibaba and Tencent took them by surprise.
The super apps benefitted from a mix of rapid smartphone adoption, first mover advantages, weak consumer protections, and fierce competition with each other. It’s probably that combination of circumstances that’s hard to replicate, not the authoritarian country bit (there are lots of authoritarian countries that haven’t fostered super apps).
The Chinese government was not entirely happy about the result; for example, the dominance of WeChat Pay and AliPay poses a threat to the state-owned banks, which are a major channel of government control over the economy. That is why the Chinese government has spent the last few years cracking down on the super app companies in various ways.
I don’t see how this would work outside of authoritarian countries
I mean, you saw the people he was meeting up with during world cup and stuff right? I think that’s the plan.
That explains him supporting the alt-right.
The thing about these everything apps is that they filled a niche in the markets they’ve succeeded in. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, Google doesn’t operate their Play services or Google Pay in China, meaning there was a vacuum for something else to fill it. WeChat and AliPay has done that.
It’d take a LOT of effort to build a platform like Paytm for the U.S., nevermind other markets. You can’t just buy a microblogging platform and magically redevelop it into something like Paytm. He’d need to partner with other businesses and whatnot, and I just don’t see there being any sort of interest in that kind of partnership.
There’s been attempts to build these sorts of “everything apps” before. Facebook has tried and failed. I think Snapchat has tried it. Apps here in the west tend to focus on doing a single or a handful of tasks really well. If an app ends up doing too much, it’s often split into several apps.
Yeah, I have trouble imagining this working in the US, even if Musk hadn’t spent a year flushing his cash and credibility down the drain.
I don’t see it working in Sweden either.
- We have apps for identifying ourselves digitally, most popular being BankID, but there are alternatives like Freja E-ID and various others.
- We have apps for easy money transfers, Swish being the most prominent, and it can be used to pay in stores and such as well.
- We have apps that combine economy management and shopping, I’ve no idea how popular they are, but Klarna comes to mind.
Amazon launched here a couple of years ago, and I think they’ve clawed out a niche in the market shockingly, but they’re not the “go to marketplace” for everything. If I want to buy electronics there’s like at least half a dozen online (that often have physical locations) stores I’d go to first. Same thing for larger appliances, clothes, make-up/beauty/skin-hair-care, shoes, sporting goods, furniture. Amazon is mostly for like weird niche stuff, like it’s the only place I could find a detergent that’s designed for robot mops that doesn’t contain tea-tree oil. Amazon is also a decent place to find mass-produced cheap garbage tat, like LED string lights and what have you.
They also make use of the same delivery services that all other stores do, so there’s no point in using them if you want speedy deliveries. I also don’t feel safe as a buyer when using Amazon because while I’m sure they have to be compliant with Swedish consumer laws, I’m also positive they’ll make the experience as tricky to navigate as possible. If I buy a motherboard from say Inet, and it breaks, I can just send an email to Jonas at Inet and they’ll sort it out. Nothing will be that straight-forward with Amazon.
Anyway, the point of that massive segue is; if a MASSIVE specialised company like Amazon has failed to fully establish themselves in their own niche here in Sweden, how on earth would a broken microblogging platform manage to “out-compete” other, trusted, and established services?
Musk is aiming to use twitter for a niche that doesn’t exist. Literally the only demand for this dream platform of his, is himself.
Speaking of buying weird niche items from Amazon: I’ve ordered spare parts and other weird and obscure electronics from Amazon so many times that now they think I’m a company and that I should have a company account.
How did this happen? If I want to buy normal stuff, I’ll walk to a normal store and buy it there. If I need something a bit more special, I’ll probably find it somewhere within a 2000 km radius. If nobody sells what I need, I’ll try Amazon. That’s why my shopping history looks like I’m running some special company.
He was involved with PayPal so it’s not a huge stretch but I wouldn’t trust anything with that clown.
He was ousted from PayPal before it become PayPal. Actually his name for the service was X, so this might be long awaited dream.
He really wasn’t that involved. He was trying to build an everything app. Peter Theil went with PayPal and booted Elon.
Yeh was going to say this sounds more like wechat.
Which are basically operating systems, and therefore not needed and against the rules of the iOS and Android app stores.
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And let’s remind everyone because people seem to forget.
I pretty much run everything through paypal for the extra layer of security.
It saved my ass when I was doxxed and hacked. I had my logins and financial information stolen.
I can totally see not putting more than a few thousand into the balance if you’re going to use it like a secured credit card.
Otherwise, keeping $0 in it and using it as a middle man between your bank and the outside world is a fantastic solution to protecting yourself.
Was forced out of after he almost tanked the company trying to do this exact thing.
What’s the definition of insanity again?
Yeah, it’s not an original idea. He’s recycling his ideas.
ExTwitter
That is too simplistic of a name and un-original.
If this product moves forward, it’s likely to be on a small scale. For example, like when a person needs to send a friend reimbursement for a coffee. So, initially, if it needs a simple name for paying back friends, or other pals, why not just call it Pay-A-Pal, or PayPal for short.
No bank account, no actual cash and everything happens in the system. It’s revolutionary! It’s like digital transactions that happen through pure accounting for a small fee. Like credit cards, but those are old.
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Somehow services like PayPal manage to avoid being regulated like a bank. I’m sure they’ll
clobbercobble together some potentially unlawful solution and not face any repercussions for it.Paypal is a bank here in europe. Hope musXk leaves Europe.
iirc the money storage aspect of PayPal has to be regulated as a bank.
I think because they’re a payment processor. Banks store large amounts of money, make loans, etc.
It’s going to be like a crypto or PayPal wallet where you can store a balance, it’s just not insured or regulated like a bank.
I saw an article a while ago where a concerning amount of people were doing that instead of a bank account.
They issue credit and lenders finance this. There’s always a bank.
Cobble?
The Things been put in charge of their legal team.
It’s cobblin’ time
makes shoes
Yes, jesus thank you. It was right on the tip of my tongue.
“Clobber” implies violence, which is somehow even less elegant than the standard phrase that the haphazard “cobble” implies. Given the shitshow of X so far, clobber probably works better even if it’s not the usual way to phrase this at all.
And despite cobble and clobber implying violence and inelegance, cobblers are either some of the best versions of pies or the people that maintain your fanciest of shoes.
Even if he complies to all the regs. There is no way people in the west will switch to his app. The reason why those all-in-one apps took off in China and Southeast Asia is because banking infrastructure sucked hard before. You could only pay cash in most places unless you went to more upscale stores. Because those payment terminals are just too expensive for many small time businesses. With the arrival of those apps even a street vendor could afford to accept digital payments. Thus lots of people started using those apps to pay. The western countries already have good banking infrastructure and people are very hesitant to switch banks.
people are very hesitant to switch banks.
Wells Fargo still existing is pretty good evidence
I think it’s plausible he will actually pull X out of the EU completely and concentrate on the US. Banking regulations around the world vary greatly and I can’t see him wanting to handle all that.
Wanting or able to handle it?
Yes
Paypal was built on the idea of a system that was without regulations that were tough. Paypal in the UK operated out of Ireland up until recently out of FCA control knowing full well they were committing fraud on a grand scale with things like “We’re closing your account and if you want your money back get in contact with us in 180days time” which was the email people used to get when the system didnt like you for any reason.
Yeah, getting the licences involves a ton of audits, compliance to a bunch of regulations, etc. All stuff Twitter has no experience with.
It would literally be easier to just start this thing from scratch instead of grafting it onto a social network.
Best he will do is another paypal/venmo thing. No way its gonna be a bank.
I mean, he wanted Paypal originally (and to name it X), so this just seems like the end goal he was trying to get to the whole time.
And it will still crash and burn. Gloriously so.
I wouldn’t trust this trust fund mafioso with a plastic spoon, let alone banking credentials.
Wait until you find out he founded Paypal, which was called X.com at the time
He didn’t found paypal (or x.com for that matter) but he was CEO (?) of X when it acquired paypal, which promptly ousted him for trying to rebrand paypal to X despite the former already have massive brand recognition thanks to its exclusive partnership with eBay.
Well he made PayPal.
So he probably knows a thing or two about the financial sector.
Maybe he’ll integrate PayPal into X
He didn’t though.
Don’t believe all the bullshit about what he has “created”. He was fired, but got to keep is equity. Peter Thiel was the PayPal founder.
Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2008.
For a long while, Elon was very successful and very popular. Like most CEOs, he claimed all the work at Tesla and SpaceX is of his own creation. And sure, I am sure he was responsible for a lot of the financial success of those two companies. He sets goals for a company and the people in those companies try to achieve those goals. In Elon’s case, he sets many goals and many projections that tend to fall flat. That doesn’t matter if you are successful in getting more investors and boost stock prices.
However, once he started running his mouth on Twitter, it became very clear that his charisma couldn’t keep up.
Also, the financial sector is nothing like it was when PayPal was founded. There weren’t regulations in place that could apply directly to that kind of company yet. While he may know more about the financial sector simply because he deals with many more zeros on a daily basis, his “revolutionary” description of how he wants to transform X shows that he is way out of touch.
Quite simply, Elon has proven that he cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to reporting anything financial. For example, him and the “CEO” of X are currently saying that advertisers are returning at record rates. This is getting proven wrong, or being shown as misleading at best.
Nope, PayPal bought his x.com company and fired him as the CEO.
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Wasn’t his company bought out by PayPal?
He didn’t make paypal. Not even a founder.
No another fascist created PayPal.
He didn’t though. He failed to make X, got booted out for being insufferable, then the company he owned equity in bought and sold PayPal
I’d rather let a crack addict manage my money than let Musky any near it.
I’d rather let a crack addict manage my balls than let Musk anywhere near my money.
I’d rather let an addict manage to crack my balls than let Musk anywhere near my money.
Especially if he “manages” money the way he “manages” companies!
There are going to be a lot of people saying how stupid this entire concept is in the comments.
Let me tell you something, as a person who spent years in finance. There’s no fucking chance on Earth this happens. You will win the Powerball twice consecutively before Musk pulls this off.
None of this infrastructure exists in X and all of this infrastructure is exactly the kind of shit Musk hates. Automobile regulations are fucking nothing compared to financial regs.
Adoption aside, which you’d have to be fucking insane to adopt this platform as a payments platform, the regs alone will ensure this never, ever, materializes.
What Musk describes will someday exist. He will not be involved, and the day is well over a decade away.
This is “Kanye West running for President” level of stupidity. The people close to him have let him down by not telling him how stupid this is.
The people close to him have let him down by not telling him how stupid this is.
More like, he fired every one who would dare to say that. And those who still are with him know it’s a stupid idea to tell him that.
Well that’s unfortunate. I’d love to toss my savings into something this impulsively reckless dingus concocted
He’s going to make a Robinhood/PayPal clone and it’s not going to work. Why? Because we already have Robinhood and PayPal.
It’s just such a dumb idea, the only people that will fall for it are cryptobros.
Amazing. This will go worse than his proclamation that self-driving cars will be the norm today.
All true, but there’s no detail in that article saying that’s what he wants to do. Copying Apple’s approach where they’re a front end to an existing bank, also fits the narrative.
I wonder if an app to unite all your online services would be legit, but I can’t see those services cooperating with that, so you’d effectively have to be malware
Is it possible to remain subscribed to Technology but not get posts about this person?
Remember when the reddit technology sub banned articles about tesla? Good times.
Depending on your client you can likely filter or block specific users and phrases.
Does Lemmy have post tags or flair or whatever it’s called?
It is under development
On Android you can filter posts with the Eternity app.
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/eu.toldi.infinityforlemmy
If you’re on mobile, connect has a post filtering by keyword feature
Dunno how to ping the mods, but maybe they should add that rule. It’s pretty annoying to get spammed about Muskrat and XXX.
Sync can filter by keywords.
Boost and Sync have hide support.
“Money or securities or whatever.”
Spoken like a true genius. /s
Keep burning your money, Elon; I can’t wait until you’re poor enough that no one gives a fuck what your latest horrible hot take or idea was. You won’t be missed.
Why do we keep posting his drivel on every platform?
Popcorn material
Because the things he says and does affect real people, and it’s important that this behavior is known so that he doesn’t get away with his shitty misdeeds in secrecy.
Nah. You guys just love to bond over the mutual hatred of Elon. There’s a ton of more influencial people than him of who hardly nobody is talking about here. Elon is like Trump. They get loads of free attention and media cover largely because the haters can’t stop talking about them. Before I came to lemmy hardly remembered Elon exists.
Elon is like Trump.
In that, they’re both assholes who have influence over people’s lives? Yeah, exactly. Literally my point.
We shouldn’t let them operate in the shadows. They need to be exposed. Every single time.
Well there’s still the slight difference that Trump was the president of the most powerful nation in the world and Elon is a random tech bro. If you don’t drive Tesla nor use Twitter or Star Link then what ever Elon does has virtually zero effect on you life. You’d be surprised of how insignificant person he is outside this bubble. Most normal people pay no attention to him as they shouldn’t.
Tell that to the Ukranian soldiers who had their Starlink access cut off during a critical moment in the war with Russia or to the people injured/killed by Tesla’s half-baked autopilot that Elon refuses to admit is not safe for public use, both of which are decisions spearheaded by Elon, directly.
It was not cut off. Starlink was not enabled on the coast of Crimea in the first place. They asked Elon to enable it to which he said no.
It’s honestly amusing to see what batshit strategy Musk will use next to fuck up Twitter. It’s like he’s trying to force every smart employee to leave, drive away every advertiser possible, and get users to find other homes.
Oh boy, if Elon Musk has trouble dealing with regulators and oversight agencies when managing his car company or his social media company, imagine what a wakeup call it’s going to be when he wants to start dealing with banking regulators. 0% chance he doesn’t run afoul of them in the first year trying to run his business by the seat of his pants like he does with all the others.
Yet another half-baked idea to spill out of the mouth of this fucking moron with too much money for his own good.
Yea I work for a bank in Europe. Good luck with running a bank here, he must be insane.
Worst part is it’s not half-baked… It’s been baking since before 2k…
You won’t need a bank account because all your money will be stored in my account 🤣
Resting in my account
I hear you’re a racist now
FatherElon.
My girlfriend has a theory that he’s trying to destroy the platform deliberately. I disagreed with her until he renamed it to X lol
Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works on why this does not make any sense.
- When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.
- He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
- If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
- If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.
Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.
Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.
It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.
Could have been both, twitter gets messed with enough to drive off normal people and musk gets to rebuild it from the ground up afterwards using what ever is left or they knew musk would be poison to twitter and let him just have fun with it
“I’m sorry but i just sacrificed a very expensive social media just to get some quet time”
I have no idea why the idea of twitter being the meat-filled pumpkin they threw into Musk’s enclosure to keep him busy cracks me up so hard, it just does
Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.
This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.
It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.
Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don’t see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.
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Oh yeah, neither of us were assuming he was intelligent- just a flailing asshole with a grudge. But you’re probably right.
I don’t think he meant to. He’s just an idiot.
Right wing control of Twitter was always my hypothesis, since, as people have pointed out, Twitter gave regular people access to people with influence. Destroying Twitter destroys that access, but it was more valuable as a tool to manufacture consent, like most media.
to right wingers, failure is good as success
think about it, trump is a godlike business man despite failing numerous times at all his businesses. he loses the election people still think he won. caught with nuclear codes giving them to enemy intelligence? it was probably a librul framing him.
if x goes under people will say it’s part of musk’s master plan
yeah that seems the most plausible explanation to me at this point.
Been saying that for a while now too. The people bankrolling him; Saudi Arabia and Russia, have a vested interest in seeing Twitter burn after the Arab Spring organized around it, and Ukraine found so much support on the platform. The thing is, he can’t directly run it into the ground without lawsuits so he’s doing it piece by piece.
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I am so sick of hearing about this cunt.
I’ve reached the point where I will downvote anything relating to Elmo the muppet.
Just add a filter
Elmo’s single letter “X” is almost unfilterable on some apps… Adding a space before/after can help with accidentally blocking more content to some extent but it’s a big ooof situation
Ugh, my feed in Lemmy is full of this now. Is it feasible to “lower” the visibility of a keyword like “Musk” or “X”?
I suppose this doesn’t feel weird to anyone who lives in China. They have a Whatsapp -clone called Wechat, and it’s pretty much exactly what Musk wants X to be able to be.
Which indeed should scare you.
WeChat’s API is way more accessible than the nightmare X is, with its current state there’s no way to reach that massive adoption. I’d argue that even Telegram has a higher chance than X for such a superapp position given the steps they’ve taken.
I’d argue that even Telegram has a higher chance than X for such a superapp position given the steps they’ve taken.
I live in Russia, have used VK before Telegram became a thing, and the thought of a company owned by Durov with that much power scares me shitless.
I can’t even describe that feeling, emotionally it’s something similar to combination of Saint-Petersburg (I hate that city), Russian-speaking Web (like 4chan gone respectable) and the more elitist layer of Russian university youth (just somehow reptilian and unpleasant and untrustworthy, while not being quite as bright as they themselves may think).
I mean, reading what people say about TG’s protocol may give you some idea as to why TG is bad. Also its desktop client source is open, looking at that is also, eh, an unpleasant experience.
My personal opinion is that any app getting a similar dominance to WeChat worldwide is a scary as fuck thing, and should not ever happen.
However, from a developer’s perspective; ease of access to development tools is crucial to reach that kind of adoption to the point where other companies are writing software to work with your platform. Telegram provides lots of these things pretty well, and it wouldn’t surprise me for them to become a superapp in the future, as opposed to X where it’s pretty much impossible.
Though worldwide laws and regulations are quite a hard hurdle for any app to beat in the first place. We’re currently seeing the example of “even one of the richest blokes in the world could pour all their money to make such a dominant app and it wouldnt work” after all.
Elon has explicitly said he wanted twitter to become wechat.
Will that include the social credit score?
Only for people that are against free speech like those that disagree with him.
It feels like one of these work hand in hand with regulatory bodies/government, while the other take every possible occasion to shit on regulatory bodies and governments.
It’s strange, because I wouldn’t, not even for a moment, ever in my life consider this.if I feel this way, so does a large chunk of the population.
So its already failed imo.
I dunno, it has 200M active users, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t surprise me if “free bank” popped up in their face a few times a week with “free transfers” and “guaranteed best interest rates”.
For parts of the world ‘free bank’ and ‘free transfers’ are just the norm anyway. I’m amazed it isn’t the case in the US already.
They still use paychecks…
Not the only thing they’re stuck in the past on…
What is the alternative to a paycheck? Most Americans get the money deposited directly to their bank account anyway, there’s no actual paper check involved.
It’s always crazy to be reminded this. The banks make money from your savings and your debt with them, they don’t need to be double or triple dipping on charging you for the privilege of letting them do that or sending it to somewhere else to do the same
I hope you are wrong, but you make a great point
It’s actually wild to me,as a Canadian, how this isn’t a thing in America. Interac blows away my American friends on a constant basis.
Good point.
I dunno, it has 200M active users, doesn’t it?
It’s hard to be really sure, because we know there’s a staggering number of bots.
But I suppose even if the real number is a fraction of that 200M, it’s still a huge number of users.
Before I deleted I had 20 followers, and 15 being bots
At this point I’m surprised that “X” has employees.
I assume anyone who can get work elsewhere has, and they’re left with dead wood.
Nah, the remaining employees aren’t the “dead wood” necessarily. They’re all the ones on H1 visas who can’t legally work in the US anywhere else (without taking a massive risk).
Probably likely to be a lot of L1’s there. At least H1B can move if sponsored, whereas for L1 you’re basically fucked.
Well that’s gross. And probably quite right too.
Musk has fanbois in tech space for some reason. Only people left now are chronic asslickers, so obviously Musk feels empowered to do anything. These people will gladly take his shit down their throats.
Every time that dude gives another “vision of the future” it just sounds worse and worse.
I don’t want another commercial bank but on the internet. I want more non-profits. I don’t want self-driving cars. I want better public transportation.
Make the post office a bank
Musk must have a fetish for having government regulators up his ass. The FTC is already up there to where he screams like a pig. Now add banking-but-not-a-bank and they’re going to be up there even further.
Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Tesla stock, nfts, x/ai subscription… He just keep ripping off dumb fanboys and it keeps working
Evidence suggests otherwise. The real question is how do they…
Which is exactly how banks make money btw
