Elon Musk Plans To Turn X Into A Bank: "You Won't Need An Account"

Elon Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter), gave a hint on Thursday that the platform will bring features of managing financial services and will be available by the end of 2024. According to a report in The Verge, Mr Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino held an all-hands meeting where he said that the company needs some licenses for that and the condition will be fulfilled within the next few months. This is yet another push from Mr Musk to turn X into an "everything app", like other popular services WeChat in China.

"When I say payments, I actually mean someone's entire financial life," Mr Musk said at the meeting, as per The Verge report.

"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," he further said.

Ms Yaccarino said the company sees this becoming a "full opportunity" in 2024. Mr Musk added to that, saying: "It would blow my mind if we don't have that rolled out by the end of next year."

Currently, the company is working on securing money licenses across the United States so that it can start offering financial services.

Mr Musk also spoke about PayPal, which he co-founded in 1998 and bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. "The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000," he was quoted as saying at Thursday's meeting by The Verge. 

"And for some reason PayPal, once it became eBay, not only did they not implement the rest of the list, but they actually rolled back a bunch of key features, which is crazy. So PayPal is actually a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago," he further said.

The billionaire had spoken about turning X into a financial hub before. In November 2022, while meeting Twitter employees for the first time, he had said that "there's this transformative opportunity in payments". He had then mentioned about his goal to enable "people on Twitter to able to send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real-time".