Elon's failed attempt to build a 'Super App'

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Elon Musk said he wants to turn X (formerly Twitter) into a WeChat clone - a super-app, or everything app for the West that he claims could revolutionize payments and could take over half the world's financial system. I think this will be super hard.

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[turtleidiot]

The key thing Elon is missing here is that for a super app to work you need trust. And judging by the mass-layoffs and childish behaviour, people have lost a lot of it in regards to twitter

[leviathan]

Isn't relying on one service to do EVERYTHING kinda scary? Now one company holds ALL the data. Who in their right mind would use such a service?

[jal]

It's already lost. The first thing a payments app needs is to be trusted, and his bad calls have destroyed all the trust people had on Twitter. It won't get anywhere.

[PeteS_]

I kind of think the reason modern apps are so successful is because they do one thing. The early internet in the West has websites that tried to do everything at the time but didn’t do tasks well.

[DanielLavedoniodeLima_DLL]

In Brazil, the Central Bank created a payment protocol named PIX to handle digital transactions between person-to-person or person-to-business. The transactions generally take seconds to complete and it's widely adopted by banks and business here. Any digital payments that are not credit card based and don't use PIX are destined to fail here. WhatsApp, for instance, is insanely popular in Brazil, but no one uses it to transfer money because they don't use the PIX protocol (since they're not a bank with local representation). I imagine that a lot of other countries have some distinct local financial behavior, and I think Twitter/X will not be able to localize their solutions.

[nickelrevie]

I think Elon accidentally put himself into a position where he needed to purchase Twitter (entering an agreement as a joke) and now he's just trying to do what he wants using Twitter's base instead of building a whole company from scratch (which he could have done at any time) because he needed to do something with the company he reluctantly bought.

[ottergauze]

Twitter barely functions as Twitter as-is, if he really expects it to become as big and as comprehensive as WeChat he’s living in a fantasy, but that was hardly hard to believe.

[pavelmares]

Yeah, Elon says a lot, and delivers like 5 % at best.

[Ajan-X]

Building a payment app based on the most toxic platform that bans critical users seems like a solid strategy. #GoElon

[NessX]

Im a autistic middle schooler and my teacher told me i "could be like elon musk if i try hard enough" bro if this is elon musk then fuck it, im going homeless

[abbofun]

Who in his right mind trusts Elon with his money? I surely don’t.

[EdLrandom]

I wanna have an app within my app where I can open a super app to run a mini app with a script on the website that will run a java game launcher within an emulator to run my banking app

[Struct.]

I don't think it will, Twitter had a tiny user base, low trust, and a terrible ux. Not much has changed yet, so it would require some insane transformations for it to even stand a chance to survive as a social media platform.

[NicoTheCinderace]

Twitter is pretty much on a downward spiral thanks to Elon.

[laizerwoolf]

It's interesting to note that Jack Dorsey, co-founder and the former CEO of Twitter, established his own successful payment app, Block (previously known as Square). This achievement might reveal underlying wisdom and possibly a deliberate reason why Dorsey chose not to integrate a payment system into Twitter in the first place. Perhaps there's some unspoken insight into why this may not have been a good idea.

[faridmousavinia]

The super-app idea has been implemented in iran by the iranian government aswel. The close relations between iran and china's government is probably the reason. Most of the super-apps we have here are government supported and controlled apps where you can do lots of things in them. I think its been 3-5 years since we have these kinds of apps here.
The only thing we dont have here is money transaction in chat apps because We dont use any iranian based chatting app because all are government spyware apps and have a lot of censoring. Majority of people still use telegram and whatsapp even though they've been blocked by the country. It has reached a point where every single person has at least 3 VPNs installed on their phone and after the protests of last year most major VPNs like nord, express, windscribe... Are completely blocked.

[zitachiii]

So he kicked half of the Twitter employees and after that he want's to create a super-app on Twitter, I mean Twitter didn't even manage to fix the bot problem.

[limabravo]

Yeah like everyone should just blindly trust a much disliked conspiracy loving right wing government hating narcissist nut with all of our finances where said narcissist nut gets to pocket a percentage of each transaction. I wouldn't trust this hairplugged nut with one single thing.

[teomai]

Correction, Grab is not a Singapore company. It's Malaysia but the operating HQ is in Singapore. The co-founders of Grab are all Malaysian and the CEO of Grab is one of the Tan Chong Motor Holdings Berhad founders grandson.

[PtrkHrnk]

I think there's potential for not-so-super apps, that would focus on integration in one specific industry each. For example the passenger transport app, memberships app, delivery app...