Musk is working on enabling money transfers in Twitter
Just like Weibo. Similar to Applepay. The ultimate goal of this expansion is to transform Twitter into a comprehensive payment gateway solution, incorporating traditional bank accounts, cryptocurrencies, and other financial services.Musk's goal is to generate $1.3 billion in payments revenue for Twitter by 2028. The news came after Musk revealed he will to allow users to tweet a whopping 4,000 characters making Twitter posts more like Facebook. If this works it could be the western version of Weibo opening up a dominant income stream for the beleaguered platform.
Over the past few months, Twitter has been working towards obtaining the necessary licenses to allow money transfers between its users. This would allow users to send and receive payments through their Twitter profiles.
[...] It remains uncertain whether Twitter will be granted the necessary licenses and if it will successfully navigate through this new venture. Perhaps Musk is merely testing the waters and gauging the market before making a full-fledged commitment, as he has done with other changes he has proposed in the past.
(Score: 5, Funny) by istartedi on Thursday February 02, @11:34PM (2 children)
4000 characters is the soul of Twit.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 03, @08:58PM
You mean the soul of A twit.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday February 04, @10:39AM
The headline should read "Desperate billionaire gadfly's latest brain fart fails to impress" or something. What's next I wonder?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday February 02, @11:50PM (3 children)
4000 chars is like a complete A4-sized paper. Filled to the last spot. Somewhat more then your average post. A fairly massive increase compared to how it started out with 140 chars.
(Score: 5, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 02, @11:56PM
If I were a Twitter consumer (which I never have been) I would want a filter setting where I could choose how long of a tweet I get notified for. Reading 4000 characters is a significantly larger interruption than reading one hundred and fou
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @01:55AM (1 child)
It's completely wiping out the original design of Twitter which was meant to be compatible with SMS, but it's a better solution than obnoxious "tweet threads" that are dozens of posts long, or screenshots of press releases.
(Score: 3, Funny) by helel on Friday February 03, @02:50PM
But without white text on a solemn black jpg how would we know when companies are taking <current issue> seriously?!?
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 03, @12:32AM (3 children)
When your banking app is also your social media app, things will find all new ways to go pear shaped.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Friday February 03, @09:58AM (1 child)
Looking forward to the twitter message/money scams. Where you just send people money by messaging with them, responding to their tweets or reading their posts or whatever. There will be way.
(Score: 2) by evilcam on Tuesday February 07, @01:18AM
It's something that is a real blindspot for me as an Australian, who has been able to digitally send money to any other Australian bank account, in a few seconds, since the late 90's (called the Real-Time Gross Settlement system) is that this doesn't exist in the US/Canada and you're still using cheques and paper money like 19th century peasants.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @08:24PM
Yep, it's just going to be a giant cess pool of scamming, laundering and (oops!) dark money to shady causes. What we are seeing in real time nowadays is power corrupting things absolutely.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Friday February 03, @12:49AM (2 children)
Musk is trying to recreate his PayPal days. At least Twitter will be useful for something if it happens.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Friday February 03, @05:47AM
Having been burned by that particular flaming bag of dog excrement, I am sure as hell not giving his new one a chance to repeat the experience.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Friday February 03, @01:53PM
Just to be picky, Musk is actually trying to recreate his x.com days. Paypal and x.com were rivals until the two merged and the x.com operation was axed - partly because the name sounded like a porn site, and partly because the x.com software written by Musk was a crock of shit anyway. Musk was not too happy about that, but he did well financially out of it.
Back then Paypal was a service owned by Confinity, and "Paypal" did not become the company name until after Musk was booted out for being an arsehole.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday February 03, @01:41AM (1 child)
If I had any money in Twitter stock, no later than now is the time to get rid of it. Musk is clearly desperately trying to somehow squeeze blood from this turnip, and I wouldn't want to have any part in that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @07:06PM
He took it private so AFAIK everybody got cash. It's also called a "tender offer" and I've bitterly equipped at times, yeah, because a certain body part is tender due to the fact that PE pulled the rug on you knowing it would rebound later. IMHO, it ought to be a lot harder to withdraw shares once a company goes public, perhaps even illegal unless the company is legitimately bankrupt.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Friday February 03, @02:07AM (3 children)
In it's original format (140 characters), you could say a couple sentences. That limit is useless if you want to have a conversation about anything more complicated than your favorite color. Nevertheless Twitter has been wildly popular and a huge success. 4000 Characters makes twitter a message board. That market is pretty saturated.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Opportunist on Friday February 03, @07:52AM
140 characters is more than you want to read from most peeps. Ponder this if you will: Isn't this more than you ever wanted to read from me?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Friday February 03, @03:08PM (1 child)
Like all social media, Twitter was an accidental social engineering tool(that became an intentional social engineering tool) to make everyone dumber, less patient, and as annoyed as possible at all times.
Not from any intent to do good or ill, but just because dumb, impatient, constantly aggravated people are constantly engaged and are marginally more tolerant of ads.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @08:29PM
Exactly - keep engagement up so people are exposed to adverts longer to let the propaganda work its magic. 6 impressions => enters the subconscious.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by ngarrang on Friday February 03, @02:09AM (7 children)
...and he has the financial resources. I firmly believe he will succeed in his task to transform Twitter into what he envisions. The haters will continue to hate. The sycophants will continue to...um...phant? But from a logical reasoning, he is going to succeed eventually.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Friday February 03, @08:03AM (3 children)
If you define "success" as "getting something to save face", yes. He will. It will eventually be something where he can claim "that's what I always wanted" that isn't a total train wreck. He has the money required to get there, and he can throw it at the problem until the problem drowns in money.
If you define "success" as a viable business investment.... HA! No fucking way.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by richtopia on Friday February 03, @03:58PM (2 children)
I'm skeptical and have no desire to use Twitter myself. But I'm not going to say there is no fucking way the business turns profitable. Musk has been open about trying to mimic WeChat as a Super App that does everything. Those platforms are very popular in East Asia, and it could become popular here. And payment processing is a real vector to financial revenues, unlike Twitter's current microblogging market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday February 03, @09:55PM
As long as he finds dupes that think he's some sort of economic Midas that can turn every turd he touches into solid gold, I'm pretty sure he'll find a way to at least make it profitable for himself.
(Score: 1) by wArlOrd on Saturday February 04, @05:25PM
Since twitter apparently doesn't even pay its rent, can I predict that twitter will collect the money I send, not forward it where I tried to send it, then manage to send to Elon?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday February 03, @01:43PM (1 child)
Maybe not so much. His own wealth is mostly in his shares of Tesla and SpaceX, and the other shareholders of those companies are already edgy about him selling them, pushing down those share prices. As for attracting more investment into Twitter, given its performance so far and Musk's own silly antics (which have blown a hole in his reputation for making money out of nothing), that will be difficult.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, @08:38PM
It's a classic personality cult. The fact that his whims and tendencies control the share price means there's barely a viable business under there. Either he keeps on "growing" as a brand (towards what...? US dictator?) or he goes poof! and disappears as a train wreck on his own private island with a turnover of dubious characters and prostitutes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday February 03, @03:17PM
Having a company be so in debt the interest payments are greater than the operating revenue isn't something I'd liken to inevitable success.
Every bit of evidence available to outsiders seems to indicate he made an impulsive decision to buy the company after getting annoyed at an mid-executive not doing his bidding instantly when asked, that it cost him dearly in terms of his personal fortune, and that it did not leave the now-private company in a situation with a course to profitability.
I make it no secret that I have disliked Elon for years, so you can toss me in a bucket labeled "haters" if you'd like, but social media has long been overvalued, and paying a huge fucking premium on top of that, then destroying the income base that existed at time of purchase is, I think, an objectively disastrous decision.