Elon Musk announced the launch of the mysterious super application X ‘for everything’
As you know, Elon Musk changed his mind again – the businessman no longer wants to sue Twitter and agrees to return to the agreement to buy the social network for the same $44 billion (at the rate of $54.20 per share). What’s more, after that, the leader of Tesla and Space spoke on his Twitter page about plans to create a mysterious application X ‘for all occasions.’ Taking into account the billionaire’s previous statements, this potential service could be inspired and very similar to the popular Chinese super app WeChat.
There aren’t any details yet on this mysterious super app X ‘for everything’ — Elon Musk only noted that Twitter’s purchase will help speed up its creation by 3-5 years, with the caveat that this estimate could be wrong. Yes, Elon has become much more circumspect in his statements and estimates of the terms of implementation of various projects (I wonder why that is?).
As Bloomberg mentions, previously the ‘Techno King’ Tesla openly admired the application of Tencent Holdings Ltd. (WeChat), which has evolved from an ordinary manager into a kind of mini-internet, which is used by more than a billion Chinese people every day.
Recently, Elon Musk has been outspoken about how to make Twitter more useful, making it clear that he wants to make the social network more like WeChat and the sensational TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance and is quite successfully displacing Facebook and Instagram in the US. Among other things, he drew parallels with the so-called super apps common in parts of Asia, which allow people to use one app for a whole range of different services from communication to calling a car. And here involuntarily mentions the warning of Bill Gates that the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk does not bode well. On the other hand, Elon Musk and Bill Gates were never friends (1 and 2).
At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk emphasized that he uses Twitter a lot and has a lot of ideas on how to make the platform ‘radically better.’ He compared his ambitions for Twitter to the vision of fintech X.com, which he founded in 1999 with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne and Ed Ho.
The phenomenon of the success of WeChat, which is so admired by Elon Musk, was largely facilitated by censorship in China – Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other American services are simply blocked in the country. The service is heavily monitored and censored, with an army of bots and human moderators who effectively filter out content the ruling Communist Party does not want. And everything from obscene posts to dissent and criticism of the government falls under the filters.
Musk himself calls himself a defender of constitutional rights and freedoms on the Internet, but his reputation is far from flawless and is significantly tarnished by numerous scandals. In April, CNBC aired a long story (we made a synopsis), which highlighted the ‘dark’ side of one of the most outstanding IT entrepreneurs of our time, who is admired by millions. And there are several high-profile cases that clearly demonstrate Elon Musk’s intolerance of criticism – for example, we can recall the high-profile conflict between Musk and British speleologist Vernon Unsworth, who criticized SpaceX’s compact submarine (here it is) for the operation to rescue children from a flooded cave in Thailand in the summer of 2018.
Actually, just the day before yesterday, Elon Musk unpleasantly surprised with his misunderstanding of reality – the head of Tesla and Space got into a very loud scandal with his ‘peace plan’ for the Russian-Ukrainian war and the spread of Kremlin narratives. And yet, for such ‘expertise’, Ukrainians and faint-hearted Westerners showered the eccentric billionaire with ‘gentle’ words, and now ‘threw down’ money on ‘a history textbook for Elon Musk’.
