Elon Musk says Twitter purchase 'accelerant' to creating X, 'the everything app'
Musk has said Twitter could accelerate X by 3 to 5 years
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Billionaire Elon Musk revealed Tuesday that his decision to buy Twitter for $44 billion is ultimately "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app."
"Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong," he replied to a user who said it would've been easier to start X from scratch.
X.com was initially an online bank that Musk co-founded in 1999. It went on to merge with software company Confinity Inc. a year later and changed its name to PayPal.
Online marketplace eBay bought the electronic payments provider for $1.5 billion in 2002 and, in 2015, PayPal was spun off into an independent company.
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| PYPL | PAYPAL HOLDINGS INC. | 64.10 | -0.74 | -1.14% |
| EBAY | EBAY INC. | 51.34 | +0.16 | +0.31% |
In 2017, Musk bought the X.com domain name and relaunched the site.
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Musk's latest tweets come after the CEO of Tesla said during electric vehicle’s annual meeting in August that he had a "grander vision" for what he thought X.com or X corporation could have been.
"It's a pretty, pretty grand vision," Musk said. "Now obviously, that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years. So it's kind of like something I thought would be useful for a long time."
"I know what to do," he continued. "I don't have to have Twitter for that but it would, like I said, it's probably at least a three-year accelerant and I think it's something that will be very useful to the world."
A few days after the meeting, Musk floated the possibility of making X.com Twitter's competitor if the deal didn't go through.
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Musk is not the first to consider creating a so-called everything app.
WeChat, a Chinese app used for messaging, calling, payment and other functions, was created by Tencent Holdings. The super app has amassed over 1.2 billion users since its initial release in 2011.
At a town hall with Twitter employees in June, Musk said he wants Twitter to reach one billion users and that he planned to replicate WeChat's model, noting that people in China "basically live" on the platform.
"If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success," he said at the time.
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| TCEHY | TENCENT HOLDINGS LTD. | 43.44 | -0.41 | -0.94% |