Elon Musk has given his employees at social media platform X a year to roll out a payments processing mechanism that can enable people to get rid of their bank accounts.
“After 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 corporate, 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 checking account.”
Musk appeared virtually on the meeting from his hometown of Austin, Texas — a move that raised eyebrows provided that he had famously forced employees back into the office upon taking up the firm.
Linda Yaccarino, the previous NBCUniversal executive who Musk tapped to be CEO of X, was also absent from the corporate’s San Francisco headquarters.
She conferenced into the meeting from her office in Latest York, according to Fortune.
Upon taking up Twitter, Musk demanded that distant employees report back to the office.
Some employees embraced the boss’ “hard core” vision and slept on the office floor after working grueling hours in the course of the chaotic days and weeks after the acquisition — during which Musk laid off most staffers and instituted sweeping changes to the location’s content moderation policies.
Since purchasing the location formerly generally known as Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has laid out a vision for X becoming an “the whole lot app” similar to China’s WeChat, which mixes fast 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 newest functionality comes amid a series of recent 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 wouldn’t need a phone number for the features, which can be available on Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and private 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 corporate private, so its books are not any longer public — but in July, the Tesla CEO said the corporate had lost about half of its promoting revenue and continues to face a large debt load.
“We’re still negative money flow,” he posted on the location on July 14, due to a about a “50% drop in promoting revenue plus heavy debt load.”
“Need to reach positive money flow before we’ve got the posh of anything,” 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 higher, down 17.8% year-over-year based on combined monthly energetic users for Apple’s iOS and Android.
With Post Wires