Elon Musk has given his employees at social media platform X a year to roll out a payments processing mechanism that will enable people to do away with their bank accounts.
“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk told his charges at an all-hands meeting on Thursday.
Audio of the meeting, which was held to mark the one-year anniversary of Musk’s acquisition of the company, was obtained by the tech-centric news site The Verge.
“If it involves money, it’ll be on our platform,” Musk said, adding: “I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”
Musk appeared virtually at the meeting from his hometown of Austin, Texas — a move that raised eyebrows given that he had famously forced employees back into the office upon taking over the firm.
Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal executive who Musk tapped to be CEO of X, was also absent from the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
She conferenced into the meeting from her office in New York, according to Fortune.
Upon taking over Twitter, Musk demanded that remote workers report back to the office.
Some employees embraced the boss’ “hard core” vision and slept on the office floor after working grueling hours during the chaotic days and weeks after the acquisition — during which Musk laid off most staffers and instituted sweeping changes to the site’s content moderation policies.
Since purchasing the site formerly known as Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has laid out a vision for X becoming an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat, which combines instant messaging, social media, mobile payments, video conferencing, and other features.
After rebranding Twitter as X, Musk signaled he would turn the platform into a super-app, offering a range of services from messaging and social networking to peer-to-peer payments.
To that end, X recently announced it was launching an early version of video and audio calling for some users.
Musk described a post on the platform instructing users on enabling the feature as an “Early version of video & audio calling on X”.
The latest functionality comes amid a series of new features and changes to the platform’s core experience under Musk, who acquired the social media company nearly a year ago.
Teasing the feature in August, Musk had said users would not need a phone number for the features, which will be available on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and personal computers.
Musk has hit work cut out for him at X, which was already struggling financially when he acquired it in a deal that closed Oct. 27, 2022, and the situation appears more precarious today.
Musk took the company private, so its books are no longer public — but in July, the Tesla CEO said the company had lost about half of its advertising revenue and continues to face a large debt load.
“We’re still negative cash flow,” he posted on the site on July 14, due to a about a “50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”
“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he said.
According to research firm Similarweb, global web traffic to Twitter.com was down 14%, year-over-year, and traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers was down 16.5%.
Performance on mobile was no better, down 17.8% year-over-year based on combined monthly active users for Apple’s iOS and Android.
With Post Wires
