Elon Musk Speaks About His Vision for Twitter as a Payments App

While some continue to criticize Elon Musk for buying the social network for too much money, the engineer is devising a plan to make Twitter the app for everything. Musk explained his vision for Twitter's entry into the payments market, which will be a game-changer.

Elon Musk explained his vision for the Twitter-as-Payments-App during a livestreamed Twitter Advertisers Meeting held Wednesday on Twitter Spaces. He suggested that in the future, users will be able to send money to each other on the platform and transfer their funds to verified bank accounts. Also, later maybe be offered a high-yield money market account to encourage users to move their cash to Twitter. Earlier Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Twitter had filed registration paperwork last week that would allow it to process payments.

At a meeting on Twitter Spaces, Musk explained that the paid verification Twitter is now rolling out with the upgraded Twitter Blue subscription, as well as support for the content creator ecosystem, could pave the way for a payment system on the platform. To do this, Twitter will first need to make fundamental changes to its technology architecture to better support video. After that, the platform can compete with TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and others like it. The Washington Post has reportedly seen mockups of the concept, which suggest that creators will be able to select pre-set prices to view their content. As a result, creators will have a cash balance created by content monetization.

Musk also noted that Twitter's paid verification will help plan payments because anyone who signed up for Twitter Blue has already been verified by a regular payment processor. Twitter Blue subscribers must sign up with a credit or debit card, and their payments are processed through in-app purchases on the app stores to help fight fraud.

Musk explained that this payment system can scale as soon as users have a cash balance. Twitter may offer users the ability to transfer this money to their platform. In addition, the platform can even make a small donation to user accounts to get them started.

“Now we can say, okay, you've got a balance on your account. Do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter? And maybe we pre-populate their account…and say, okay, we're gonna give you 10 bucks. And you can send it anywhere within Twitter,” Musk said.

In the long run, Musk appeared to be toying with the idea of ​​establishing bank accounts on Twitter’s platform that would pay a high-interest rate to attract users. In the long term, this could become a competitor to Apple Savings Account for cardholders, various fintech companies or other payment systems such as PayPal and Venmo, which encourage their users to save cash balances in their own ecosystems.

“The next step would be this offer for an extremely compelling money market account where you get an extremely high yield on your balance,” said Musk. If such a system existed, people would move cash to Twitter, he explained.

“And then add debit cards, checks, and whatnot and…just basically make the system as useful as possible. And the more useful and entertaining it is, the more people will use it,” he said.

Musk is no stranger to the payment systems industry and has not only a deep understanding of the business, but also experience. Although all the ideas put forward will not necessarily be translated into reality, he demonstrates having a very concrete view of building an app for everything, which, in the end, can become extremely attractive and mega profitable. While critics have a very short-term view of Musk's purchase of Twitter, the engineer and savvy businessman is busy building another highly attractive company that blossom into a tasty morsel for investors.

© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts; follow him on Twitter

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