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AnActOfCreation @programming.dev

1y ago

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.’

www.theverge.com Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank

Musk wants your “entire financial life” on his platform.

Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank

“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!

Technology @beehaw.org

Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank

www.theverge.com /2023/10/26/23934216/x-twitter-bank-elon-musk-2024

Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank

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337 comments

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.
  
  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

337 comments