Elon Musk lifted the veil on Twitter’s latest developments in an advertiser call Wednesday, revealing one of the new Twitter chief’s goals is to enable verified users to send money to other users.
“Now we know that this is someone who has been authenticated by the conventional payment system, now we can say, ‘You’ve got a balance in your account, do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter?’” Musk explained on a Twitter Space Q&A regarding advertising. “And maybe we pre-populate their account and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna give you $10 and you can send it anywhere within Twitter.’”
The Twitter boss has previously hinted at rivaling Chinese app WeChat, which wraps communication and financial transactions all into one, tweeting in October that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
While verified users would be able to send money to anyone on Twitter, Musk suggested that if the desired location is outside of the app, users would attach an authenticated bank account to their Twitter account, along with debit and credit cards.
“Then the next step would be, ‘let’s offer an extremely compelling money market so you get extremely high yield on your balance,’” he continued, underscoring the goal to “make the system as useful as possible.”
Within just over two weeks into owning the app, Musk is making moves to stand as a rival to WeChat, a goal he also expressed outrightly to Forbes in June. “There’s no WeChat equivalent out of China,” he told the publication at the time. “There’s a real opportunity to create that.”
On the call he also expressed a goal to enable monetization of content for creators, saying “if we provide creators with the ability to post what they create on our platform and to monetize it at a rate that is at least competitive with the alternatives, then of course creators will post natively their content on Twitter.”