Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank - ‘You won’t need a bank account... it would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year.’
2y 7mon ago by programming.dev/u/AnActOfCreation in technology from www.theverge.com
“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.
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.
This will almost definitely have a large "crypto" aspect. Which means the business model starts at unregulated fraud and gets worse from there.
But yeah, I assume there is a whiteboard at twitter headquarters, smeared with feces, that has
- Become bank
- ...
- Too big to fail
Somehow services like PayPal manage to avoid being regulated like a bank. I'm sure they'll clobber cobble 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.
He didn't make paypal. Not even a founder.
Wasn't his company bought out by PayPal?
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!
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
With Boost for Lemmy you can block specific words, really good app btw, they have their own Lemmy community. https://lemmy.world/c/boostforlemmy
Thanks, sounds useful here.
Sadly I am fussy when it comes to apps and Boost appears to be proprietary.
Too bad, it makes Lemmy quite pleasant to use. I've been using Boost for years (when it was a Reddit app), and imo he makes the best apps for these kinds of sites.
On Android you can filter posts with the Eternity app.
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/eu.toldi.infinityforlemmy
i mostly browse via old.lemmy.world and i am badly missing RES and its filters.
If you're on mobile, connect has a post filtering by keyword feature
I would love that. Closest you can get is blocking the top Musk posters, my feed significantly improved since then (not perfect solution of course, as you might lose other content, and sometimes you’ll see Musk posts like these from an OP who is not always spamming them)
Who are these top musk posters so I can block them too? So tired of hearing an asshat continue to be an asshat. Every. Single. Day.
Dunno how to ping the mods, but maybe they should add that rule. It's pretty annoying to get spammed about Muskrat and XXX.
Boost and Sync have hide support.
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.
“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.
They had previously had access, and then were denied further access by geofencing critical regions. That's effectively the same as having services cut off.
Starlink was never enabled in Crimea because that would be against the sanctions placed by the US. You're spreading misinformation.
Isaacson writes that Musk reportedly panicked when he heard about the planned Ukrainian attack, which was using Starlink satellites to guide six drones packed with explosives towards the Crimea coast.
After speaking to the Russian ambassador to the United States — who reportedly told him an attack on Crimea would trigger a nuclear response — Musk took matters into his own hands and ordered his engineers to turn off Starlink coverage “within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.”
This caused the drones to lose connectivity and wash “ashore harmlessly,” effectively sabotaging the offensive mission.
Ukraine’s reaction was immediate: Officials frantically called Musk and asked him to turn the service back on, telling him that the “drone subs were crucial to their fight for freedom.”
They had access. Musk revoked it from the Crimea region after the fact.
No they didn't
Isaacson, the biographer, issued his own clarification on Sept. 8, acknowledging that Starlink was not enabled in Crimea in the first place:
To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.
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.
You won't need a bank account because all your money will be stored in my account 🤣
it will blow my mind if Twitter even still exists by then.
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.
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.
All the evidence suggests he can't be trusted with his money, let alone my money.
Prediction: He's going to try to pay his employees in Xits: Your going to negotiate a salary based on a floating exchange rate with a new cryptocurrency and then when it starts to tank he will refuse to renegotiate based on the fact that its headed for the moon!
Bringing company scrip back for old times sake
Maybe he should move to some remote bit of jungle in Brazil and start Muskland.
As someone who worked for a tech banking company many years, you are too stupid to do it.
This shit is complicated as fuck.
Oh and all the tech in the world or capital you could build is worthless unless you have that sweet banking / credit license in US. And lets just say its really really hard to cone by nowadays.
Oh please. It ain't complicated. I could write a ruby app in a weekend that would do everything a bank does. It's just subtracting from one account and adding to another.
- Elon Musk probably.
"Security?! Nah, the Russians are my best friends"
"All you need is security bars in front of your windows"
Ok, now let me present to you: Rolling reserves.
Well, he could presumably hire some smart people to make it happen, but he'd have to pay them...
Also, this is assuming he wants to be an actual bank and not just pay employees in scrip that you can only spend through things they provide.
There is literally prior art from him in this regard. He just decided to call it a payment processor so he did not have to do all that bit about it being other people's money.
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"?
Buy a social media company because you know there's no way you'll ever make one naturally
Claim that it's too full of bots and try to walk out, despite having already signed the deal
Treat your new employees almost like slaves because apparently sleeping at the office is a reasonable proposition
Rebrand the social media network for no good reason, tanking value
Drive advertisers away by changing the algorithm that helped make site so good
Lose millions in company net worth and become an internet laughing stock
...Have the bright idea to save the company by also making it a...... banking provider....
?!
His first garbage idea. He's super nostalgic for X the platform her merged with PayPal to become super wealthy especially after the people that knew what they were doing had to pay him to leave.
Literally the same concept, name and everything. It's like he thinks he can just start over at the first app and it just will be propped up by a corpse. Idiot.
I think he originally wanted to purchase the platform during the crypto boom in order to use it to add crypto nft Doge features and then the crypto market crashed and then he changed his mind about buying it but he was contractually obligated so he bought it and ruined it and now he's going to start a bank run on toilet sentence
Dumb idiot who constantly is wrong in predictions says more stupid shit, news at 11.
He's not making wrong predictions. He's lying to hype his products and make more money.
It's the return of company scrip.
The most-garbage/toxic notion of tech platforms these days is when they masquerade as tech platforms but are really unregulated banking platforms.
I'll just go on the record right now and say I'm never using XitPay or whatever he decides to call it.
man wanted to name his own kid X Æ A-12 I'm sure it wont be something incredibly stupid. Somewhere in X HQ: chatGPT give me a cool sounding name with the letter X in it!
XBucks.
What is the ratio of Stanley Nickels to XBucks?
Bux, of course.
That sounds an awful lot like a games console... thank goodness Elon can't buy Microsoft
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.
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.
At this point I'm surprised that "X" has employees.
If they did, would you trust him?
I wouldn't. Ever.
His platform struggles to push text around reliably. Could you imagine using that for money?
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.
Lets put all our money on a platform rushed in under a year made from an exhausted and abused team of engineers. That sounds like a great idea. Definitely will be well thought out and reliable.
Not to mention identity fraud already being commons there
For sure fraud won't be totally rampant...
Also I think the hardest part of being a bank is the shitton of regulations (especially in Europe) and not the software.
Twitter might need to hire a lot of experts and lawyers in that field to make it work.
Also banks are all about trust - and that's precisely what Elon lost for most people in the last year
Not to mention that the existing Twitter infrastructure was already incredibly insecure before Musk even took over.
Twitter does little to monitor for so-called insider threats, employees or contractors who use their positions in the company to steal information, and instead leaves them “virtually unmonitored."
Twitter suffered security incidents significant enough to warrant a report to a government agency about once a week, with 20 breaches in 2020 alone.
Twitter devs can already take over user accounts since they all have prod admin access (which they need because Twitter still has no QA or staging environments). I can only imagine the potential for abuse once people's finances get tied together with their account.
Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Tesla stock, nfts, x/ai subscription... He just keep ripping off dumb fanboys and it keeps working
This is exactly what he envisionied "X.com" to be back in like 1999... jesus christ, doods having a midlife crisis.
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.
I'm gonna trust the guy who got rid of his CSAM team with my money.
I'm gonna trust the guy who pimped Dogecoin with my money.
I like my credit union.
Ignoring the Elon factor….it will still be a bank account. It will just be a bank account that can only be managed through twitter.
Thats not a better banking experience.
There are plenty of online banks that do all the stuff people want. So good luck with that. And enjoy all the hideously complex finance regulation & legal obligations that varies from one location to another.
Cool story Elon. Hey, where's that full self driving you promised would be ready next year 5 years ago?
It continues to blow my mind that anyone cares what this fucking gasbag has to say about anything.
Lets hope the app developers leave his company.
It’s hilarious how Musk gives his staff ultimatums. The fact is they can get other jobs. It’s Musk who is deeply invested in Twitter now and can’t just cut his strings so easily. Why is he the one batting them around and threatening them all the time? What the hell kind of gluttons for punishment are still working there?
The fact is they can get other jobs.
I'm guessing many of his US staff are stuck at Twitter due to the visa rules. They're basically very well-paid slaves, and he knows it.
No doubt someone is in that situation. But I don’t think most people know how rare H1-Bs are. Only 65k are issued annually in the US, which has a total employed workforce of 157 million people.
Yeah cause the most common job is truck driver.
H1Bs that is whom
Yes a notable exception. Twitter was 8% H1-B employees prior to all the layoffs. We don’t know how many are there still.
Those folks are really living with a totally different level of concerns. “My boss is a raging asshole” is not a significant concern compared to being forced to leave the country.
As for the other 92% of the company with no visa concerns, why are any of them still there? I am tempted to assume they’re the coasters who don’t think they can find as good a paycheck anywhere else, or are just happy to ride the ship down.
Maybe they think the disaster will end, maybe they have families to support, maybe they would rather be fired and collect unemployment. Many years ago I worked for a company that got bought by Teledyne and they pretty much did what is happening to Twatter. I stuck it out until the end.
It’s hilarious how Musk gives his staff ultimatums.
In this case he didn't though. It's just an intentionally misleading clickbait headline and if you read the article itself there's no mention of a ultimatum.
You’re right but it is something he does. If he’s saying this publicly I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s ultimatums privately.
This sounds like an amazing idea. Twitter is currently filled almost but not entirely with the worst we have of society.
He's going to get as many of those as possible, who already appear to have impaired decision making capability, to hand over their money.
He is the absolute worst at managing his money so he'll just lose it on the next bad bet.
Then maybe the SEC stands up and drags him off to jail?
Hell even saying that you won't need your bank might be damning when he finally releases the project.
He got his start by his dad's emerald mine, let's see how much he has lost over the years.
From January
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has broken a record for the largest amount of money lost by one person, according to Guinness World Records. Musk lost between $180 billion and $200 billion since November 2021, largely due to the poor performance of Tesla stocks in recent years, according to the report.
From September
Since Musk and partners paid $44 billion including debt, he's implying that the platform would now change hands for $4 billion (the $44 billion purchase price minus the $40 billion in "value destruction"), for a drop of 90%. In effect, he's saying that the $31 billion he and his partners invested in equity is totally gone, and a big portion of the debt from provided by the cream of Wall Street sits far underwater.
didn't he win a Guinness world record for losing the most amount of money by one person?. and isn't Twitter bleeding money because of his shitty decisions?
you might get the number 1 spot by lying to people about your success or lying to customers, it you think buying something that's worth much less than what you paid is being good with money, then sure he deserves number 1, but maybe he's just lucky that his father had money and he seems to be just an idiot
When you inherit a ton of money and invest it in every stupid idea you have...
With enough time and money eventually you'll stumble into something successful by pure chance. That doesn't mean you're good with money, just that you got lucky.
You don't hear about the people who inherited daddies money and proceeded to slowly go broke with no successes to speak of.
The evidence of Elon's poor business decisions speaks volumes towards "being wealthy doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you got lucky."
Musk has become erratic, irrational, and volatile. These are not conditions suitable for someone who manages other people's money. Financial institutions know this, and will not be a part of his delusions.
You know, "securities" or.. whatever. .....
Elon can't even be trusted with his own money (or money from wealthy Saudi Arabian "benefactors"). Why would anyone give him their money?
Leverage.
It's a pretty bad idea to fire the majority of your employees if you want them to basically recreate Stripe (not just PayPal/Venmo) and somehow mush it into Twitter.
Also, that market is saturated, most banks and credit unions in the US already supports Zelle, and Venmo, CashApp, and PayPal are very estabished tech financial players in this space.
Again, if there ever was a possibility of an American WeChat equivalent to be built, the only one who ever had a chance to build it was Zuckerberg more than a decade ago, during the very short time period when the general population was adopting Facebook, but the old Facebook users have not started migrating off it. Trying to build WeChat in the US in 2023 is foolish at best.
I've worked in financial tech (now called 'fin tech) since 1994. In the USA, We have more laws governing our banks than our food. I've got my popcorn to watch this...
Ah yeah just like FSD was supposed to drive you coast to coast without intervention by end of year 2016
And then it was for end of year each year
To be fair, company scrip is a proven method of employee exploitation. Musk is much more likely to follow through with this on time.
Elon is so bad that we like Zuckerberg more than him
I wouldn't go that far.
Zuckerberg is better at shutting the fuck up, which is an important skill to master when you're a bellend.
A person can speak all they want, I the end of the day zuck negatively affects my life more than elon does.
Musk started talking about a "hyper-loop" that he had no intention of making just to discourage the building of a high-speed rail system so that more cars (ie. Tesla's) would be sold.
I don't know where you live so it may not affect your life, but Musk has more of a total negative effect on people's lives than Zuck does.
I live in Canada, so yeah no effect on me. And I won't deny he's scummy, just one scam bag has had far more of an impact on my QoL.
At least zuck gives people some time to migrate to another service before he enshittifies it... elon on the other hand wasted no time at all, he lit up the twitter shitter pretty much immediately
Won't lie, I hated twitter before all this, so seeing it die makes me happy. It was something I was hopingfor before this shitshow.
For some reason I read that as Zoidberg. I was like no contest!
People have to censor their curse words in images now on facebook, trust me the zuck is not far behind the muck
At least he understands what's going on. I think Elon doesn't have that level of consciousness.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
What's next? Company stores? They already have company housing…
Eventually Musk is going to have them buying 'X cookies' and 'X cereal' so that they don't have to pay them real money.
I can see people using it as a go-between to send money to people over twitter or as a small emergency fund thing. Doubt many will use it as their primary bankery.
LOL... no.
I feel like at this point Muskys strategy with X is "well I own a software company now so we'll just make all the software" with literally zero understanding of the context or how that must work.
I think it's pretty telling in some of his comments about "well my space x engineers flew a rocket so they should know how to make a social media better than Twitter employees" as if those skills translate whatsofuckingever.
He has no idea how different types of software work, the context in which they'll be used, and has no fucking clue that you can't just upend the entire global financial institutions. But his devs flew a rocket so they should be able to drive a car, write social media software, write banking software, etc because those are all just easier.
I'm with you on alot of this.
But Elon DID found PayPal. It's not like it's uncharted territory.
In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho.[12]
I think this quote proves the point I'm making.
Sorry for saying it was PayPal directly he founded, but it seems they pretty much bought the platform from Musk at put another label on it. (and ofc added to it)
Why do people claim he did. He didn't
Finally a place I trust less with my finances than Redneck Bank
The level of delusion of this man is through the roof
I go on twitter now and 3/4 of adverts are AI scams or 2009 click bait with fuckin community notes explaining that remembering a set of politicians names is not linked to hi iq, as claimed by the clickbait advert.
Then there is the 'verified' accounts that are doing genuine harm at misinformation spread.
Yeah I'm not trusting ol musky chuckles with my money. And that's coming from someone who uses traditional banks despite having witnessed their government bail out banks multiple times after they were fucking reckless to the point of needing a bailout.
So he’s suggesting that Twitter become a bank
The last x.com he "made" merged into PayPal, he's just going in circles.
Sounds highly illegal
They're working on securing licenses to move money. They're making a financial services play (similar to what apple has done). It's a great idea for X, but I'd never trust them with my money.
Narrator: It was.
With clowns like this running the show stuffing your money under the mattress like the old depression-era trope seems a better and better idea. Unstable billionaires, AI being dragged into Wall Street, domestic and geopolitical fuckery…. Makes me wonder what my 401k will look like in 20 years, or even 50. Just more middle-class money propping up rich people only to be set on fire before I get to it?
Can we just change this to /c/dumbshitwitter
Lmao what the actual fuck is he smoking today? This shit is wild.
Hopefully he puts all his assets into this and the trainwreck quickly rusts away with it.
Ugh, I honestly do not trust Musk to meet federal regulations for any of this.
I still have a Twitter eh I mean X account. Don't really use it that much, other than following other people. But no way I'm letting one of Elon's companies handle my finances.
I've already tried PayPal, never again
The thing about from financial transactions is:
a) governments will insist on regulation and influence
b) the recipient needs to use the same system.
If my landlord and my brokerage aren't on TwitterFinance, there's no way to use it to send them money
If TwitterFinance is a bank you can just send money via bank transfer, right? The same way I send my friend who uses another bank some euros after a dinner.
Depends on whether the twitter thing turns out to be a PayPal, Cashapp or an actual bank... if he makes it a Cashapp then direct bank transfers are off the table AFAIK
O, I see. I've never used PayPal or Cashapp, so I learned something new today!
Seems like he is going ahead with the X "The Everything App" idea. I'm glad I use parts of the Fediverse and hope to build my own instance at some stage as I really don't want people like Musk owning my data let alone charge me for it and control my money.
He'll just steal it. And if you fight back, he'll sue you into oblivion. It's the capitalist way.
@slurpeesoforion The worst bit is, the US government seem to be on his side
Imagine if this guy was your boss.
I had a boss like that. He adored Elon and mentioned him in almost every sentence. The nasty cunt didn't wash his hands after he was finished on the toilet, and he used cocaine non stop. I left pretty quic
I'm confused. The article keeps mention "X". What is "X" about?
Company money? This sounds like company money.
Someone ought to show him that paying employees in Scrip is illegal, because no one sees how you bank. It's your private business. It's not anything remotely like working at a Ford dealership and driving in with a Honda.
People who use twitter think its totally ingrained into society and what drives all public discourse....
People that dont use twitter could give a shit, its a huge circle jerk.
It's crazy how much people on Twitter think Twitter matters. It's absolutely tiny compared to Facebook and Instagram.
There is no way in hell I’d trust this chucklefuck with anything I think is important, let alone money.
Stop trying to be the Antichrist, Elon. We already hate you...let that be enough.
Oh yeah because if anyone deserves trust in handling money it's Elon Musk. Oh wait.....
Hard to see from down here if his (mental)ballistic curve is already falling or if he's still in the zero-g phase, but kinda interesting to watch. Uuh, that'll make a loud splash when he hits the ground.
Unless twitter gets an actual bank charter and is regulated by the FDIC, X wouldn’t get a cent from me. Even if they claimed to pay incredible APY. Elon musk would steal billions from his customers and wouldn’t blink. And if your deposits aren’t insured then your money isn’t real.
Even if he did all that, why would you ever give him anything?
Yeah he won’t be able to do business in the uk for sure.
Yeah the amount of compliance necessary to launch a savings account in the UK is nuts, and thats when youre going through a 3rd party provider like Clearbank who already has all the actual money handling services, but let clients palm them off as native banking accounts
And the auditing. Omg the twice a year auditing.
Yanis Varoufakis said a while back that Elon is trying to replicate China's Wechat, which basically does all this. Owning digital platforms and having total control over them is now the best way to make money, and Elon basically wants that for everything.
Musk, CEO of Tesla and X (formally known as Twitter) causes catastrophic bank run, says "it doesn't matter they can just use X now." Join us at 11 for more.
Introducing Xcoin! Dont worry, Musk premined them all and is staking them so that you know they're high value!
I’ll pass, thanks
Is he gonna channel all that sweet income into supporting Dickopedia?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money.
He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all-hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge.
The company is currently working on locking down money transmission licenses across the US so that it can offer financial services.
“The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000,” Musk said on Thursday’s internal X call.
“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.
The original article contains 400 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
He's trying to turn Twitter into WeChat. A near universal app everyone uses for chat, payments, etc.
I set up a play-money prediction market on whether this would happen, and it doesn’t look like many people have faith in Musk to pull this one off.
He's a grifter. All he needs is a routine bet from a billion people and he potentially pays back on loans. He thought it might be possible with subscription, but he's considering a way to emulate previous cryptocurrency manipulation now.
Looks at towering pile of timelines Musk has committed to and failed to deliver on.
I've got just the spot for this news.
Nope, not even for a free pony.
He's not wrong in this case, it's doable. There are many startups building similar services with arguably fewer starting resources. You should run completely in the other direction, but it's not impossible.
Credit products, especially virtual, are easier to create than ever thanks to companies that have built out that infrastructure. Chequing can be facilitated and held by a major bank under the hood in most cases.
It might not be his end game, but it's definitely possible. Now, forgive me while I weep for anyone that uses it if they manage to deliver it.
But honestly who in their right mind would trust musk with their money?!?
Sure, but when did bring in your right mind preclude you from being a customer? There are plenty of industries based on preying on idiots
I don't even trust Elon Musk with Elon Musk's money.
Well, they can always trot out the age old strategy of paying people to sign up.
Damn, the idiot has been loose eating Tide pods again ...
Fuck banks. Also, fuck whatever this is.
It already exists, it's called Wechat. And it's run by Winnie the Pooh.
Let's trust all our saving to this dude making random decision, wannabe memelord, who just sank 40 billion of his own money on a bet. All that just to take revanche on PayPal who threw him out of the board because they didnt trust him and his idea to have a company called X
This guy wants to be SBF round 2. Watch. People are going to put their CASH on X.com with no regulation or anything while promising crazy returns if you jusf deposit your funds and “stake” your US dollars as a quasi-investment in X, only to have a total rug pull job with X filing for bankruptcy and all the money being unaccounted for. He will sell it as, “we have to have this money because the ADL forced all our advertisers off the platform”. Fortunately, all that’s left of the people on X.com are stragglers and the far right/nazis, so they will just lose their money.
If you are still on X, you’re supporting an anti-Semite ultra powerful billionaire plain and simple. Musk pushing all the same talking points. White genocide, Jews are the cause of their own persecution via ADL, etc. Quit giving this guy your money by engaging on his site.
The other possibility is that it’ll be like Tesla’s self driving tech that has been coming “by the years end” since 2016 and it’s just meant to drive investment. Both are equally likely. The guy is a fucking grifter to the max. I can’t believe I used to think the hyper loop was a cool/realistic vision for the future. Fuck Elon Musk.
Sounds to me like a attempt to move toward Scrip.
🤣 he's trying to turn twitter into chinas Wechat
Folks he is conning
Call themselves wolves, march like sheep
I do pity fools.
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Thanks, I needed a good laugh..
Here’s their potential path, maybe ….
I have no idea the limitations of this approach, if any, but just experienced it a few days ago. I bought something expensive online, and the timing was sensitive, else I’d lose out on a lot of money. Then I got down to the final payment. It made me really nervous and would have reconsidered if I knew about it, but the final payment could only be done through bank transfer, but they wouldn’t let me provide the standard routing and account numbers. They had a web app that brings up your banking app, has you login to that, and appears to scrape data. They were able to see my accounts and balances, as well as initiate the transfer. This was so scary, exactly like I’d expect malware to be.
Bviously I changed my passwords immediately and verified there was only one transaction and exactly as I’d expect. However yes, they controlled my bank8ng without being a bank and without any apparent cooperation from my bank. All it takes is normalizing the behavior that will get us all robbed of all we own
This is also Apple's goal, strange they didn't pass the cap yet. Paypal was the first "digital" bank, we owe him that but to be honest, i won't put my money in a US entity. It is already difficult with most of the digital only EU banks.
Don't give him too much credit for PayPal. Yes, he was involved in one of the companies that ended up in Paypal and was fired from it. Back then he was already pushing his "X app".
thanks for the clarification, I didn't dig further into it.
No worries, Elon fought hard to create the illusion that he "founded" PayPal and Tesla and that he's such a genius and now he's doing his best to demolish that image with Twitter.
He isn't responsible for PayPal. His company, X.com, merged with PayPal and he was ousted after a short period of time. PayPal already existed before he was involved.
Wu-Tang Financial or nothing!
ing!
lol :) you know what I mean.
Sounds a lot like what he used to do with PayPal until the eBay enshitification, I mean sale. I'm for bypassing banks. Elon Fanboy not.
Something about this doesn't seem right can't put my finger on it
That's actually pretty genius, if he'd be able to pull that off (which he most likely can't). Since banks can invent money out of thin air, he can pay his employees in fictional Dollars and so save a ton on employment expenses. As long as there's no bank run, he'd be fine.
Despite my distaste for the dude, more competition is good. Imagine if he really does make cheap, near instant, worldwide transfers possible and not just to 150 countries or something, but to all of them. There's an insane amount of remittance in the system. It's the entire raison d'être for some banks. If you can enter that ranking around the middle, you'll be making mad bank.
And there’s an insane number of laws and regulations, multiplied by the number of countries. He can’t make it and he won’t make it because he’s an idiot.
Oh, he's gonna get absolutely regulation raped. Still.
It’s already possible; Bitcoin does this.
Right? I'm happy when he throws money into shit.