The tech billionaire is silent about what made Tesla boss Elon Musk want to buy Twitter after all. In a tweet he only makes a vague hint.
After months of bickering, it now looks as if Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter may yet happen. Shortly before the start of a court case, the Tesla boss surprisingly gives in and renews his offer – at the originally agreed purchase price. The 51-year-old multi-billionaire did not disclose the reasons for his about-face. Musk merely wrote cryptically that buying Twitter would accelerate his path to “X, the app for everything”. And by three to five years, he added in another tweet.
What exactly is behind his vision for a universal app, however, remained unclear. At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk said he had ideas for “radically improving” the platform. He compared his ambitions for Twitter to the vision he had for X, a financial services company he co-founded in 1999. X.com was an online banking startup that later became PayPal.
According to speculation from the finance portal “Bloomberg”, “X” could be modeled on the Chinese super app WeChat. An application that allows users to book taxi rides, reserve tables in restaurants and order food, among other things. Musk hasn’t been secretive about his admiration for the Chinese application in the past.
The application is used by more than a billion Chinese people every day and is much more than a social network. Chinese users don’t really need to leave the platform as it also acts as the largest payment processor and is one of the most popular news and entertainment portals in the country. It combines functions from apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Uber, among other things. This is made possible by so-called lite apps, which are directly connected to WeChat.
What Musk, according to “Bloomberg”, is unlikely to cut a slice of: WeChat will be censored with the help of armies of human mentors and artificial intelligence and cleaned of content that the ruling Communist Party considers undesirable. After all, Musk emphasized from the start that he was not interested in the Twitter takeover for money, but rather to strengthen freedom of speech on the platform.