excited Elon Musk has renewed the $ 44 billion Twitter purchase deal A new discussion on what a billionaire would do with the popular social media platform if he ultimately owned it.
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted that the Twitter purchase is “an acceleration to create App X, which will be an app for everything.” He did not provide any other details.
Musk could allude to the so-called “super apps” or “superapps” popular in China and other parts of Asia by the likes of Chinese tech giant Tencent.
Super app is a term to describe an app that often acts as a one stop shop for all your mobile needs. For example, you can order a taxi or food through the app and at the same time it works as a payment and messaging app at the same time, this eliminates the need to have multiple apps for different functions.
The Chinese app WeChat, operated by Tencent, is the largest super app in the world, with over a billion users.
In WeChat, users can text people, do mobile banking, pay for things online or in-store by scanning a barcode, play online games, post videos, shop online, call a taxi, and many other things.
Buying Twitter is an accelerator to create X, the app of everything
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2022
Tesla’s CEO previously expressed his admiration for WeChat, describing the app as “awesome” during a meeting with Twitter employees in June. Musk said there is no WeChat equivalent outside of China.
“I think there is a real opportunity to make it happen,” Musk told employees. “You mainly live on Wechat in China because it is very useful for your daily life. And I think if we could reach it, or even get close to that with Twitter, it would be a huge success.”
Musk seeks to bring the number of Twitter users to at least one billion users, from 237.8 million at the end of the second quarter.
One of WeChat’s greatest features is WeChat Pay, a feature through which users can scan a barcode in a store for payment via their mobile phone or send money to friends via the chat function. WeChat Pay can also be used for online purchases.
Musk believes that including payments within Twitter would be a “cool thing,” according to CNBC, which was reviewed by Al Arabiya.net.
However, super apps like WeChat haven’t really taken off in Europe, the US, and other Western markets.
Meanwhile, WeChat is heavily censored in China, which Musk is unlikely to do with Twitter given his past criticisms of the platform’s content editing strategy that the billionaire believes has stifled free speech.
