The Journal. - Elon Musk Wants to Build an Everything App

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Elon Musk says he’s turning X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, into an “everything app,” an all in one place for messaging, entertainment and banking. WSJ’s Tim Higgins unpacks the vision and the hurdles ahead for Musk and his company.  Further Reading: - Why Elon Musk’s Plan for a Super App Won’t Be Easy in America  - Elon Musk’s X Rebrand Cues Complications—and Porn Jokes  Further Listening: - Elon Musk is Actually Buying Twitter  - Why Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Losing Advertisers  - Twitter’s New CEO: The Velvet Hammer  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If somebody in San Francisco were walking by Twitter headquarters on Sunday night, what would they have seen? They would have seen a giant X being projected onto the side of the building. That giant X signaled a big change for Twitter. giant X, signaled a big change for Twitter. On Monday, our colleague Tim Higgins woke up with the rest of the world to a new logo on Twitter.com. In place of that familiar little blue bird was a sleek letter X. I think it's safe to say that a lot of people don't have a favorite letter, but it is clear that Elon Musk has a huge infatuation with the letter X, and it goes back for many, many years. The Model X, which was his first sport utility vehicle for Tesla, even one of his children, he calls X. SpaceX too, right?

SpaceX is a good example, right? So are we supposed to call Twitter X now? That's the name. The question is, will users refer to it as X or will they refer to it as that thing that used to be known as Twitter? Will it be like Prince? Yeah, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Musk has a lot of ambitions. He wants the whole world to be driving electric vehicles.

He wants to get humans to Mars. And the vision behind X is key to yet another big idea. Could you talk about what Musk's plan for X is? Simply put, everything. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, July 27th.

Coming up on the show, Elon Musk's vision for X. I'm at a food truck I've never tried before. Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco? No, sir. I'm keeping it simple. Starting small. That's trading on Kraken. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be.

Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register full potential. This is a company that had been unprofitable many of the previous years before Elon took it over. And so investors, when it was a publicly traded company, there was some tension there about what could it do, what could it be. And that's what Elon is making the case for, is that he is trying to get it beyond just being that social media company, that he has this bigger, broader vision for it.

Musk bought Twitter less than a year ago. Since then, advertisers have pulled out, the company's value has tanked, and many users have left the platform. Now, Musk has turned Twitter into X, with plans to make it an app that does absolutely everything. He wants X to be the everything app. We know from some of his comments over the last few months that it is a really grand ambition, really an app that

would be perhaps at the center of your digital life. An app like that actually already exists in China. It's called WeChat. Musk praised the app in an interview on a Tesla fan podcast. Like you live on WeChat, you do payments, you do everything, and we don't have anything like WeChat outside of China. So I was like, my idea would be like, how about if we just copy WeChat? What is WeChat? Well, calling it the everything app is a pretty good way of describing it. It is your digital life if you're in China. For a lot of people, more than a billion users use this app. And it is a communication app. It's a social media app. It's a commerce app. You can hail a taxi.

You can buy things in the physical world. Basically, picture one app that is your WhatsApp, Uber, Instagram, Amazon, and banking app all at the same time. That's WeChat. For years in Silicon Valley, there has been this dream of creating a super app, the value of the platform, if you will. So much more potential than just one business, you could potentially have so many more businesses. And Elon thinks that there's potential in the Twitter platform to kind of maybe throw dynamite on the idea and really explode it faster than if it would have just started fresh as X.

Mainly because before Musk bought Twitter, it already had hundreds of millions of users. That user base is so important. That's the huge asset that he has acquired. All those hundreds of millions of people who are accustomed to going there on a regular basis, who have built that in as a habit, and the gamble is that he can convert them to do even more within that app.

So Musk has the users, but he needs to deliver the goods. And a lot has to happen before X can become an everything app. One thing is beefing up X's direct messaging features. Why is messaging so important for X to be successful? Messaging is one of those things that makes a platform sticky. You're going to that app to maybe talk to your mom, or you're going to talk to your friends. You're having back and forth.

You're needing to check it on a regular basis. Earlier this year, Musk launched encrypted messaging on X. That means people can message each other more securely. He hasn't quite reached that huge safety level that some would argue needs to be done, but they're making improvements on that. It's clear that he's already kind of working on that. Beyond just text-based direct messaging, he has signaled that there will be additional features for personal one-on-one communication, whether it's audio or video. Think kind of FaceTime, if you will, within the app. Another component of Musk's vision for X

is content. Sounds like he wants Twitter to be something more than it is. Could you talk about the kind of content he's hoping to be known for? Well, he wants it to be entertaining. He also wants it to be unregrettable time. And he keeps talking about how he wants to be measuring it in unregrettable time. Unregrettable time, or as Musk puts it, unregretted user minutes, making content on Twitter, quote, fun and interesting

and informative and less of a place for doom scrolling. What type of content would that look like? Who are the faces and voices that he's hoping to publish? Well, he sees it as a place for citizen journalism,

where the users are generating journalism, the news, if you will. Now, what that means and how it plays out, people would debate it. But in a lot of ways, what he's doing is he's chasing content creators. And the very people who have made TikTok or YouTube so powerful and so successful are these people out there creating content for these platforms. Musk's platform has attracted at least one big name so far. Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren't many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now. The argument that kind of the Elon Inc. world is making is that

Twitter is a platform for anybody to go and have potential to create a voice or create an audience. anybody to go and have potential to create a voice or create an audience. And that is what Twitter and X is providing for somebody like Tucker Carlson. He can control his own kind of destiny there as long as he falls within the rules. And so Elon has been very vocal in saying he wants to get the likes of Tucker Carlson, but also kind of the other end of the political spectrum. He wants all of these kinds of voices on there. And you see with the kind of the other end of the political spectrum. He wants all of these kinds of voices on there. And you see with the kind of the push for somebody like Tucker Carlson is the build out of the video component.

Twitter has had video in the past, but not in the same ways. And Elon has been focusing on trying to improve the video capabilities of the Twitter platform because that's where a lot of the money is. There's one other feature that Musk wants his eventual super app to have. And it's maybe the most important to him. Digital banking.

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He told his employees that with his leadership, the company could be worth more than 10 times that. Enter digital banking. It's something Musk has been thinking about for decades. All the way back in 1999, Musk co-founded an online bank, which later became PayPal. But before it became PayPal, that bank's name was X.com. Musk envisioned that X.com as a one-stop shop for everything personal finance,

from checking and savings accounts to insurance to mortgage lending. Musk later lost control of the company, but the idea of what X.com could have been always stuck with him. He would talk about it for years and the idea of, you know, well, that's this potential for what it could be. And as he took over Twitter, he starts talking about X.com again and saying, well, the original business plan is still there. And he thinks that he can just take it and run with it with Twitter. Now that he has Twitter in hand, X in hand, how would digital banking on that platform work for the user? How that might look with inside the app, still not quite sure. Yeah, I can't send you $10 just through Twitter at this point.

Right. And you can't pay for my appearance on the show. No, I'm doing this for free. Musk's critics say that it would be hard for this kind of super app to get traction in the U.S. Users here already have easy access to all kinds of goods and services on their phones. That wasn't the case when Musk's template, WeChat, first launched in China. It came at that kind of right time as the world was changing.

The rise of the smartphone was occurring in a place in China where there wasn't a huge population with laptops or desktop computers. This wasn't a hugely computer-focused community. And the smartphone really became access to the internet and the only access to the internet for a lot of people. And there hadn't been a huge dominant messaging app out there. The banking was kind of still developing online, and they were able to take advantage of that. Whereas if you go to the U.S., we have so many different apps. Think of how many apps are on your iPhone or your Pixel. So just huge, huge

hurdles to competition. Some critics also question Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter, already a super-established name, to X. Twitter really moved past being just a name. You tweet something that is a verb. To reach that kind of level is a lot of startups' dream. upstream. And so for Elon to say he's going to give up on that idea of Twitter kind of value and that brand and that kind of image, you know, is a big risk and is a big step. The letter X already has thousands of other trademarks associated with it, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Trademark attorneys told the journal that it could cost more than $100 million to get access to the

trademark for X around the world. X didn't respond to requests for comment. For now, the platform still looks and feels a lot like Twitter. Users still tweet and retweet messages. When one user asked what tweets should be called now, Musk responded, X's. tweets should be called now, Musk responded, X's. X still hasn't figured out how to solve its revenue problem. Musk hired a new CEO who has experience courting advertisers and changed up the subscription program to get users paying for services. But the company still isn't making money. Elon Musk has also said in the past that he is okay losing money on some of his ventures. What do you think of that? Elon has said that he's okay with losing money.

He's willing to say things on Twitter, and if he loses business from it, so be it. It's one of the tenets when he talks about why he bought it is this ability to have kind of a free speech platform. The question is how long the patience lasts to lose money. The man has a lot of companies. Going to space with SpaceX is a huge priority. Tesla is a huge priority. And Twitter now is on that shelf of things that kind of clearly excites him and he's putting a lot of time into and he says it's hard at this point, but he has shown kind of in

the past a willingness to take huge risks on something that he thought had a lot of potential. When he was doing SpaceX, there were a lot of people who didn't think the idea of reusable rockets was a good idea. When he was doing early days of Tesla, there were a lot of people who didn't think the idea of reusable rockets was a good idea. When he was doing early days of Tesla, there were a lot of people who didn't think the electric car could go mainstream. And he almost seems to revel in this idea of being able to prove doubters wrong. And so when it comes to Twitter, there are a lot of doubters out there. And there are a lot of kind of really smart people who have a lot of really smart reasons for why everything he's doing is wrong. And you can't help but imagine that he is sitting on the X app and looking at all of that criticism and just feeding off of it and looking forward to the day that he can say, I told you so. It's classic Elon in so many ways.

Absolutely. That's all for today, Thursday, July 27th. The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Alexa Corse, Colin Eaton, and Nulie Purnell. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.