Elon Musk is morphing Twitter into an "everything app"
Elon Musk has teased a glimpse of his vision to transform Twitter – the buzzing social network he bought for $44 billion – into an "everything app", with multiple services including messaging, video, and payments.
In a recent presentation, Musk shared some of his plans for the microblogging platform, including advertising for entertainment, a paywalled video feature (an idea similar to offerings from platforms like OnlyFans), encrypted direct messages (DMs) which could rival WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, as well as long-form tweets that will allow users to attach text of up to 400 characters to tweets instead of posting screenshots of notepads.
In October, Elon Musk said his bid to buy Twitter was an "accelerant to creating X, the everything app", where users could socialise, make payments and even shop, similar to Chinese 'super app', WeChat. Since closing the Twitter acquisition, Musk has been throwing everything against the wall to make more money at the social media company.
The frenzy of product development underlines the pressure that CEO Elon Musk is under to deliver immediate results — and returns — on the technology industry’s largest-ever leveraged buyout. To finance his Twitter deal, he acquired the company with $13 billion in debt to investing partners, putting it on the hook to pay more than $1 billion annually in interest alone.
In an attempt to cut overheads and spin up new lines of business at Twitter, over the past month, Musk has laid off over half of the company's workforce globally, introduced new subscription models and dispatched product teams to brainstorm any and all ideas that could quickly bring in money for the company.
Since the acquisition, new user signups, daily active users (DAUs) and active minutes have been at a record high and hate speech impressions are lower, according to Musk. The platform has also revealed that impersonations, brought on by its pay-for-verification plan, spiked at one point, but has since plunged.
