The Rise of the Super App – Elon Musk’s X Strategy Finally Takes Shape

Most people thought Elon Musk’s October 2022 arrival at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a porcelain sink—a prop for a joke about “letting that sink in”—was the beginning of a chaotic, egotistical experiment. In the midst of the widespread layoffs, the drama surrounding the blue tick, and the steady exodus of advertisers, fewer people paid attention to what he truly claimed to want to build. not an improved social media network. Something much bigger. An app for everything. A social and financial framework for American life. At the time, it sounded like something a wealthy man would say when he ran out of intriguing issues. Now it sounds less informal.

Twitter was never the main focus of the concept. Musk was using reverential language to describe WeChat, Tencent’s Chinese super-app with 1.3 billion users, even before the acquisition closed, implying that he had been considering this for years. He called it “Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of other things, all rolled into one with actually a great interface.” If you pay close attention to that sentence, it contains the entire blueprint. social media platform. payments. a single interface. His desire to construct it was never questioned. In a nation where consumers had learned to distrust platform consolidation the hard way through social media, regulators with long institutional memories, and firmly established financial incumbents, the question was whether he could.

WeChat’s success in China was not the result of astute marketing. It happened because it came at the perfect time, riding a wave of first-time smartphone adoption in a nation lacking the decades-old banking and e-commerce infrastructure that the West had already established. Moving from cash or cumbersome early mobile banking to WeChat meant moving away from Apple Pay, Venmo, and a dozen other embedded systems that people in Shanghai and Shenzhen already trusted and used on a daily basis. There isn’t a historical opening in the US, and a number of payments analysts have been clear about what that means: Musk isn’t constructing on vacant land.

Nevertheless, the number of moves has been growing. Early in 2023, Twitter submitted an application for a license to facilitate payments. The business was discreetly combined into X Corp, a shell corporation. A collaboration with the social trading platform eToro indicated that the feed would incorporate market and investment features. The small but significant acquisition of Laskie, a recruiting tool, hinted at the emergence of professional networking and employment. Additionally, X has been working on a digital wallet feature that would let users transfer and store money on the platform more recently. When viewed in isolation, each piece is unremarkable. Even though the entire architecture is still being put together, when taken as a whole, they begin to appear intentional.

The fact that Musk has previously engaged in similar behavior is noteworthy and should not be disregarded. Many people thought of SpaceX as a vanity project before it developed into a significant aerospace company. Analysts were penning in-depth obituaries for the brand before Tesla’s Fremont factory began mass producing automobiles.

Even when the early stages appear genuinely messy, observers have learned not to undervalue the pattern, which is chaotic, contentious, and ultimately functional. However, the risks associated with developing a super app in America are different from those associated with developing rockets or electric vehicles. Financial services regulatory exposure can subtly stifle a product before it ever reaches consumers because it is specific, cumulative, and slow-moving.

Observing the X Wallet’s growth from the outside gives the impression that Musk is most personally invested in the financial services goal. His first significant business was x.com, which he founded before merging with Confinity to form PayPal. Over the years, he has referred to PayPal as unfinished business in a number of ways after being forced out of the company’s leadership. In some ways, X might be his second attempt at that initial concept, carried out with significantly more resources and fewer limitations than he had in 1999.

It’s likely that competitors should focus on X’s trajectory rather than its current state. Analysts have identified Apple, Amazon, Block, and WhatsApp as superior contenders for super-app status in the US market. They already have the regulatory connections, the infrastructure, and in certain situations, the payment rails. However, none of them have an owner who is prepared to put up with years of setbacks and public ridicule in the name of a single, cohesive vision. A better product roadmap is more difficult to compete with than that peculiar mix of patience and recklessness.

Whether American consumers will ever want a single app to handle their finances, social life, job search, and news feed all at once is still up in the air. There is a genuine and likely underappreciated cultural opposition to that kind of consolidation. However, the infrastructure is being constructed nonetheless, covertly, feature by feature, behind a platform that was previously primarily used for debates about politics and sports. It’s obvious that X is now more than just a messy comment section on a social network. It appears that Musk decided that was only the beginning.