Elon Musk ready to push financial frontiers

• Published date: 27 July 2023
• Author: Aisha S Gani and Jenny Surane
• Publication title: Business Day: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa)

The landscape is filled with technology firms that aimed to do the same thing. Facebook spent years investing in a project called Libra that was supposed to revolutionise crossborder payments, but regulatory scrutiny forced it to abandon the project. Google planned a digital financial offering and even lined up 11 banks as partners for the launch before it suddenly nixed the entire plan. And Amazon.com considered offering accounts for consumers, but that project never became a reality

US tech companies have struggled in their attempts to take on banking behemoths, often scaling back their ambitions in the face of competition and protracted approval processes. But Musk isn't like other tech executives: his business decisions don't tend to follow predictable paths — as evidenced by his many shocking moves at Twitter, including abandoning its iconic birdbased brand for the letter X — and he does have experience in financial technology, having founded the firm now known as PayPal.

"I'm not saying at all that he can't do it," said Pranav Sood, executive GM at crossborder payments platform Airwallex. "But it's something that takes time and it's something that takes investment because you have to make sure that you do things right in order to stay compliant globally."

Musk's envisioned X app — which will connect Twitter's underlying infrastructure with X.com, a web address that now functions as a routing service to Twitter — is one that layers communication, multimedia and "the ability to conduct your entire financial world".

In messages posted in support of Musk's overhaul, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said X would include fintech features such as payments and banking. Twitter has already snagged moneytransmitter licences in four US states: Arizona, Michigan, Missouri and New Hampshire.

It was a vision Musk had tweeted himself in 2022 during his acquisition of the social media site. His musings indicated he wanted Twitter to be more like Tencent's WeChat, a messaging service turned superapp used daily by more than a billion people in China. It's also a fintech titan that allows users to send each other funds, pay for goods and services, and even borrow money.

It wouldn't be Musk's first foray into payments. He moved to Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom and founded a company — also once known as X.com — that eventually became PayPal. He made his first fortune when PayPal was sold to eBay. As for banking, Musk has said he turned down "several highpaid jobs on...