Elon Musk’s X partners with Visa on payment | Finance news

NEW YORK (AP) — X is teaming up with Visa to quickly offer a system for real-time funds on the social media platform — signaling some progress in a yearslong imaginative and prescient from billionaire proprietor Elon Musk to create an “everything app.”

Visa is the primary associate for the platform’s “X Money Account” service, which is set to launch later this year, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a Tuesday post announcing the news. The offering, Yaccarino noted, will support an in-platform digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments connected to users’ debit cards, with an option to transfer funds to a bank account.

According to Visa, which also posted about the partnership on X Tuesday, these services will be powered by Visa Direct — the payment giant’s instant money transferring service — and will be available to X Money Account users in the U.S.

Whether X Money will become available to consumers in other countries, and perhaps through additional payment partners in the near future is still known. And an exact date for the U.S. launch has also not been announced yet.

In her post Tuesday, Yaccarino called the partnership with Visa a “milestone for the Everything App” and the “first of many big announcements about X Money this year.”

The prospect of San Francisco-based X, formerly known as Twitter, becoming an “everything app” has been floated around for some time. Before officially closing the deal to purchase the platform for $44 billion back in 2022, Musk expressed interest in creating his own version of something similar to China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and funds.

And his fascination with such a platform began long before the Twitter deal was on the table. Musk has been toying with the idea of an “everything app” since the late 1990s when he launched a startup called X.com that was later merged into what became X.com. He continued to push for PayPal to diversify but was rebuffed by company CEO Peter Thiel and other executives. PayPal was sold in 2002 to eBay for $1.5 billion — providing Musk with a windfall that he funneled into the creation of SpaceX and an investment in Tesla in its early days.

The landscape is far more competitive today — with a handful of companies making similar efforts to expand their in-platform offerings. Other social media giants, such as Facebook parent Meta, have added shopping, games and even dating features.

Consumers now have different platforms at their disposal for communications, payment services, entertainment and more. How X’s coming “everything” features will fare has yet to be seen. Since Musk’s 2022 takeover, the platform has already alienated many users and advertisers over reports of rising hate speech and misinformation.

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