I miss the old Twitter when I saw the stupid X animation.
~~Twitter~~ X is Elon Musk’s world. Pretty soon he’ll have so much control over his platform that he can practically cron kings and manipulate outcomes to fit his personal political agenda. And don’t even get me started on his whole stupid “X the everything app bullshit.
The only everything app that has succeeded so far is WeChat in China. But it’s apparently a surveillance app for the masses by the government. Seriously, why the hell would I want to link my social media account with my bank account and even my government ID? What’s the benefit in that?
I’d rather keep the digital me disconnected to the real me.
I think a lot of people hear “everything app” and it sounds kind of magical but this is actually a specific category of app already, and it mostly means Payments App+ Restaurant and Convenience Delivery App + Rideshare App.
An example is Careem, which serves the Dubai market only.
You’re totally correct that X is not one of these Apps. Even by this more constrained definition.
Uber is already 2/3 of the way to this in a dominant way with Uber and Uber Eats in one app. Both of those work very well and have already for years. Adding personal payments would probably mean lights out for anyone else with foolish “everything app” ambitions.
Musk is 0/3 of the way there. The ONLY thing he has has to work with is an installed base of users. A large number of people have this app on their phone and have an account. That is something. But he still has to create, well, everything to have an “everything” app, which, as I’ve already covered above, won’t do everything.
The installed base of logged in users is also less valuable than you might imagine because to do payments and delivery is also going to require everyone to enter bank info and home address and those are big asks just in terms of user effort but also privacy.
So good fucking luck, Elon. Being a media company driven by ads sucks and I don’t blame him for wanting out but he’s chosen the most expensive possible path to becoming Careem that I could imagine. I’m just a tech middle manager but I could have given him better corp strategy advice than this.