From his first days as the CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk started to look for financial optimizations within the company. He has already made a lot of fuss about reshuffling personnel and making some paid features for users. Entering the payment business might be considered an attempt to generate another revenue stream at the social media company.
Some assume that this step is some kind of return to roots where Mr. Musk started. It was Elon Musk who pioneered PayPal back in 1999 when he participated in founding an online bank that later grew up into a digital payments company. Now, he is supposedly looking to turn Twitter into a super-app, which would include mobile payments functionality.
The functionality of Twitter payments promises to be very extensive. Elon Musk pointed out, during a live-streamed meeting with Twitter advertisers, that users would be able to send money to other users on the platform, transfer their funds to bank accounts, and, perhaps, might be offered a high-yield money market account. All these features would include fiat money. There was no mention of cryptocurrency in his speech; the Information reported, however, that digital currency (very likely Dogecoin) is also expected to be a part of the Twitter payments system.
Not very long ago, another social media giant made unsuccessful attempts to develop and launch its own payment system. We are talking about Facebook’s Libra (Diem) cryptocurrency that was supposed to integrate into the social media network. According to the former Chief Technology Officerat the Diem Association,Prof. Dahlia Malkhi, who was working on the project, the new development met with implicit resistance from the U.S. financial authorities, supposedly due to the risk of Facebook's monopoly in the field.
We wonder if Twitter’s payment project is going to face the same obstacles as Meta did, or does Elon Musk have the benefit of doubt to go through all government registration procedures? When will Twitter launch the pilot of its payment system? For now, no dates or roadmaps have been announced. Let’s observe how this project will end.
