Musk: My Twitter Would Be WeChat-Style Super App with Payments Key

Tesla CEO and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, doesn’t want to fix Twitter, he wants to fix social media. And that means adding payments.

More broadly, Musk said he would like to turn Twitter into a super app that would merge its public forum with features like chat, picture and video messaging, Facebook-style news feeds and a variety of other social media functions — including payments as a primary function.

See also: Musk Wants to Take Twitter Public, Report Says

On the May 16 All-In podcast, Musk pointed to the Chinese social media giant WeChat as a model for his social media ambitions. Like Twitter, it started off as a social platform, but it later found its true success when it added a mobile wallet and payment features.

“If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat,” he said. “It does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. It's really an excellent app, and we don't have anything like that outside of China.”

And, Musk suggested, he might not need Twitter to build an American version.

The Super App

Musk’s ideal super app, he said, would be “a spam-free thing where you can make comments, you can post videos … an all-encompassing app that’s everything from a digital town where important ideas are debated.”

Payments are a key part of that, Musk added. “Where you sort of have a high trust situation, then payments, whether it's crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense,” he said.

The super-Twitter would be “maximally trusted and inclusive” he added, having spent several minutes criticizing Twitter for banning and shadow-banning users, which Musk calls a threat to free speech.

“This does not need to be done on Twitter,” he added “It could be done from something that's created from scratch, it can be something new. “I think this thing needs to exist.”

Twitter currently lacks the “high-trust” part, at least as far as Musk is concerned. He expanded on public comments he has made about the number of fake accounts — while Twitter has said about 5% of accounts are spam bots and other non-real users, Musk said that he believed that the real number is much higher.

Read more: Twitter CEO, Musk Disagree Over Amount of Spam Bots on Platform

Asked about backing out of the sale, Musk said, It is “a material adverse misstatement if they, in fact, have been falsely claiming less than 5% of vaguer spam accounts, but in fact, it is four or five times that number, or perhaps 10 times that number. This is a big deal.”

Asked directly about choosing between rebuilding and expanding Twitter or starting his own social media company, Musk said, “certainly my default inclination is to start things from scratch.”

Payments Are Important

Musk earlier said earlier in the conversation that “it's important for content creators to have a revenue share,” he was clear that payments would be much more than that.

While it would include a PayPal- or Venmo-style peer-to-peer payments tool, that comparison to WeChat Pay is telling. With more than 1 billion users in China, WeChat Pay and rival Alipay control 90% or more of the Chinese mobile payments market. WeChat Pay owner Tencent has already begun incorporating China’s new central bank digital currency as a method of payment.

To be fair, at least on the payments front, this is a road Twitter has already turned onto with payments on its Ticket Spaces and Super Follows for content creators. In April, the company announced that it had added cryptocurrency payment options with Twitter as its first customer for that service.

See more: Stripe Rolls out Crypto Payment Capabilities, Signs Twitter on as First User

“Twitter is where people go to have conversations about what’s happening,” the social media giant’s product lead for creators, Esther Crawford, said at the time. “We’re focused on helping creators who drive those conversations earn money and connect with their audiences in new ways.”

Those cryptocurrency payments are handled behind the scenes, with no code changes or new application programming interfaces required on the part of users, who will never hold cryptocurrency