The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has outlined plans to transform Twitter into a financial super app, along the lines of Chinese social media app WeChat.
In a gathering on Spaces, Musk mused on an idea to emulate his first business Paypal, creating the infrastructure for Twitter to process payments, complete with connected debit cards and bank accounts.
Last week, the company filed registration paperwork to pave the way for it to process payments, according to a filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, which was obtained by The New York Times.
On Wednesday, Musk said that he envisioned users connecting their online bank accounts to the social media service, with the company moving later into “debit cards, checks and whatnot.”
Twitter has previously nibbled around the edges of financial services, adding a tipping feature for users to reward creators on the platform and enabling people to charge subscription fees for exclusive content, like newsletters.
In presenting his vision for the company, Musk said that he ultimately hopes to transform Twitter into an “everything app” modeled after WeChat, the Chinese social media company which has over 900 million users and has supplanted AliPay as the most popular payment service in the country.