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No More Banks: Musk Wants to Handle Your “Entire Financial Life”
- Elon Musk plans for X to do more than just send money – wants it to be an all-encompassing financial product.
- It remains unclear what role cryptocurrency will play in the upgrade of X, set to be released late next year.
- Twitter has struggled since Musk took over last year, with ad revenue down 50%.
Whether they love him or hate him, there’s no denying that the crypto community is enamoured with Elon Musk. For years, X (formerly Twitter) has been a haven for enthusiasts to discuss all things cryptocurrency. As part of the rebrand, Musk has promised to radicalise X’s services by creating an “everything” platform. The idea is to let users perform all of their financial functions within a centralised product – including banking, investing, sending money and so on. In his most recent public statement, Musk predicts the service will be available by the end of next year.
Musk Plans for X to Replace Personal Banking
Musk doesn’t just expect X to be a supplementary financial product. He wants to make online banking as redundant as possible by giving people everything they could need in one package. In a meeting with employees last week, Musk was heard saying:
“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”.
Elon Musk
In the audio recording, acquired by media outlet The Verge, Musk claimed that, “it would blow [his] mind” if the service wasn’t up and running by the end of 2024. Of course, with such ambitious goals, there are several regulatory hoops that his team must jump through before the community will start seeing the financial capabilities of X in action.
Mystery Surrounds Crypto’s Role in X Upgrade
The crypto world is still in the dark regarding how involved digital assets will be in this proposed financial hub. Musk has clearly talked about his new platform reducing the need for banks, which naturally ties into cryptocurrencies (particularly stablecoins). He has also been a long-time proponent of several digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE). However, whether crypto will be involved in any capacity remains unclear – although it would be a surprise if they weren’t given the broad range of services Musk is building.
Musk is an incredibly polarising figure and his moves as head of Twitter have done nothing to assuage that. Users are leaving the platform en masse, with ad revenue down nearly 50% since he took over the social media website. His latest change comes to creator monetisation, where posts that are corrected by “Community Notes” will be demonetised in a move to combat rampant misinformation. However, some users have reacted poorly to the news, accusing Musk of infringing on freedom of speech.
Author
Ben Knight
Ben Knight is a writer and editor from Melbourne with a passion for all things music and finance. He enjoys turning complex topics – especially the technical details of cryptocurrency – into digestible bites that anybody can understand. He acquired his Master’s in Writing, Editing and Publishing from RMIT in 2019 and has run his own creative writing business ever since.
