Twitter’s owner has given his toy a new name, but any ambition he has to turn it into a WeChat-like financial service is fanciful
So Elon Musk, the world’s richest manchild, has changed the name of his favourite toy. Henceforth, Twitter is to be known as X. Strangely, though, you can still log on to twitter.com and be invited to tweet. This is a missed comic opportunity. Instead of the chancellor being able to say, for example, that he had tweeted his concern about the public sector borrowing requirement to the prime minister, he could be saying that he had “X’d Rishi” on the matter. Sigh.
So what is it about Musk and X? Well, it goes back quite a way – to 1999, when Musk set up X.com as an early online bank. For “early”, read “weird”. Customers were not charged fees or overdraft penalties. New users got $20 for free just by opening an account and a $10 bonus for every one of their contacts who signed up. As for the venerable banking convention that you should know your customer, Musk demurred. According to Max Chafkin, the biographer of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Musk bragged to CBS News that it was easier to get a line of credit at X.com than it was to sign up for an email account. “You can fill out the whole thing, be done in two minutes, be in your account and have it funded already.” Not surprisingly, within two months, X.com had more than 200,000 users, some of whom who had given fake addresses and immediately set to writing cheques that bounced.
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