Elon Musk, X, and the Delusion of an American Superapp
Plus, is Washington finally tackling crypto?
Number of the Week: -78% (explanation below)
Elon Musk, X, and the Delusion of an American Superapp
What else to write about this week? It is extremely difficult to find anyone not on Elon Musk’s payroll who believes that Twitter—sure, maybe not historically the best-run company on the planet—was best served by killing the blue birds and rebranding as X.
Yeah, we know—Musk is obsessed with X: SpaceX, Tesla Model X. And way before that, in 1999, Musk cofounded a company that quickly merged with Confinity to become PayPal; that company was called X.com. The name appeals so much to Musk that in 2017 he purchased the X.com domain name back from PayPal for an undisclosed sum.
It’s been little noted that Musk’s original vision for that turn-of-the-century X.com was strikingly similar to the “superapp” he talked about this week (although apparently the word superapp wasn’t coined until 2010).