Faced with shrinking valuations and ad revenue, Twitter owner Elon Musk is seeking to turn Twitter into a financial institution.
Key Details
- Elon Musk purchased Twitter on October 27, 2022, for $44 billion, and he has aspirations of making it more valuable.
- Despite recent claims that Twitter is only worth $20 billion, Musk believes he can transform the social-media platform into a company worth $250 billion.
- He plans to do that by integrating digital banking, borrowing heavily from his unused PayPal ideas, into the app, The Wall Street Journal notes.
Why It’s News
Elon Musk’s ambitious vision for Twitter would require increasing the relatively small social-media app 10-fold and transforming the way users interact with each other through the service. However, his ambition is not without merit. He predicted in 2015 that Tesla would raise in valuation from $25 billion to $700 billion, and the company exceeded that valuation in 2021 at $1 trillion.
Musk was one of the founders of PayPal and originally intended to change the way the financial system worked through his startup, originally called X.com. Musk wanted to consolidate finance into a single website but was ousted from the company before he had the opportunity, The Wall Street Journal notes. PayPal remains one of the largest payment processors on the internet.
Many of Musk’s original X.com ideas could be worked into Twitter as a means of building up the hemorrhaging social network, which has struggled with retaining advertising dollars since Musk took over the company. Twitter has already made a few moves in this direction, filing paperwork with the U.S. Treasury in November for licenses to develop the website into a payment processor.
Notable Quotes
“I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world,” says Musk. “I’m going to execute the X.com game plan from 22 years ago with some improvements.”
“There’s a product plan I wrote … in July 2000 where I thought it would be possible to make the most valuable financial institution in the world, and we’re going to execute that plan … which amazingly no one has done.”
