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From Twitter to X.com: Elon Musk and the ace of digital payments
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Behind the rebranding of the social network he acquired, Elon Musk may be planning a relaunch of his digital payment platform business.
Twitter's name change to 'X' could be more than just a rebranding exercise: the founder of Tesla and Space-X could be returning to one of his first interests, digital payments; Elon Musk, it should be recalled, was one of the founders of PayPall. As Daniel Wolfe (American Banker) explains to Yahoo Finance, it was Musk himself who founded an online bank called 'X.com' (as Wolfe recalls, for a while those typing in 'X.com' were redirected to the PayPall site).
As Wolfe points out, Elon Musk faces at least two challenges. The first is the fact that Twitter has already tried to become a 'marketplace', but without success: product sellers simply had to advertise their business so that potential customers would be directed directly to their sites, without the need to create a payment account on the social network. At this point, Musk would have to compare himself, in a way, to his former self, or rather to the great success that was PayPall.
Today, Musk's project has to compete with many platforms offering e-commerce and digital payment services, as well as many online banks. How can X.com beat this competition? According to Wolfe, the key is to target X.com users by offering them an additional service. It is possible that Elon Musk is thinking of a super-app that could, among other things, offer digital payment services.
Finally, there is an element that could be another attraction for X.com: the use of cryptocurrencies. Musk has always been interested in the world of cryptocurrencies, not only bitcoin but also dogecoin, for example. Once again, according to Wolfe, the challenge for Elon Musk is to differentiate himself from platforms on the network that have the same favourable relationship with cryptocurrencies and offer the possibility of exchanging them (or, as in the case of Worldcoin, a project that offers tokens in exchange for eye scans).
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