Elon Musk Vies to Turn X Into Super App With Banking Tool Near Launch (theedgesingapore.com) 133
An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:
More than three years after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk says he's nearing his long-stated goal of turning it into an "everything app" with a new financial services tool that he pledged to launch for the public this month... Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases and a 6% interest rate on cash savings — the latter of which is roughly 15 times the national average. Musk's new product is also expected to offer free peer-to-peer transfers, a metal Visa debit card personalised with a user's X handle, and an AI concierge built by Musk's xAI startup that tracks spending and sorts through past transactions, according to reports from users with early access.
Musk, who first rose to prominence in Silicon Valley by co-founding PayPal Holdings Inc, sees payments as crucial to creating a so-called super app similar to social products that have flourished in China. WeChat, for example, lets users hail a ride, book a flight and pay off their credit card... If it works, X Money would sit at the intersection of social media and finance in a way no American product has attempted at this scale... Creators who currently receive payments from X for engagement will be switched from Stripe to X Money as their payment platform, according to early users — a move that guarantees an initial base of active accounts. Some have already been testing X Money to send payments to one another through the app's chat feature or directly through their profiles, according to early participants in the rollout...
X currently holds licences in 44 states, according to its website, and likely won't be able to operate in states where it hasn't obtained a licence.
Musk, who first rose to prominence in Silicon Valley by co-founding PayPal Holdings Inc, sees payments as crucial to creating a so-called super app similar to social products that have flourished in China. WeChat, for example, lets users hail a ride, book a flight and pay off their credit card... If it works, X Money would sit at the intersection of social media and finance in a way no American product has attempted at this scale... Creators who currently receive payments from X for engagement will be switched from Stripe to X Money as their payment platform, according to early users — a move that guarantees an initial base of active accounts. Some have already been testing X Money to send payments to one another through the app's chat feature or directly through their profiles, according to early participants in the rollout...
X currently holds licences in 44 states, according to its website, and likely won't be able to operate in states where it hasn't obtained a licence.
aka (Score:4, Insightful)
WeChat clone
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Re: aka (Score:5, Informative)
Not for FDIC-insured funds.
Surely this is a loss-leader. Expect the rug to be pulled.
Re:aka (Score:5, Interesting)
6% APR for an FDIC backed savings account is actually really good. Most US banks do not currently offer more than the fed funds rate, which is currently 3 1/2%.
His backing bank is probably going to lose a bunch of money by offering rates like this, which makes me think that's going to be a "promotional" rate that goes away quickly.
As anyone who's bought an early Tesla Model 3 with "Full Self Driving" knows, it's that Elon isn't afraid of making big promises and never making good on them.
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His backing bank is probably going to lose a bunch of money by offering rates like this, which makes me think that's going to be a "promotional" rate that goes away quickly.
I suspect there will be some limitations and/or requirements to the 6% rate... kind of like T-Mobile Money has a limit to it's "higher than average" interest rate (it's 4% for the first $3k and 2.5% beyond that). So if you have more than $3k in there, you're actually getting less than a good HYSA will give you. I'm not sure if they still do, but T-Mobile also had other requirements to even qualify for the 4% rate (like a minimum number of debit transactions per month, last I recall).
Never isn't the right word (Score:2)
As anyone who's bought an early Tesla Model 3 with "Full Self Driving" knows, it's that Elon isn't afraid of making big promises and never making good on them.
From the Yahoo [yahoo.com] article:
May 2022: In a pitch deck for Twitter investors, Musk claims the company will bring in $15 million in revenue from a payments business in 2023.
October 2023: In a call with workers, Musk says he expects X to launch a payments feature by the end of 2024.
January 2025: An X post from then X CEO Laura Yaccarino says the product will debut in 2025.
February 2026: In an xAI all-hands meeting, Musk says a limited version is in beta testing. He also publicly extends an invitation to actor William Shatner, who later posts screenshots from his X Money account.
March 2026: Musk says in an X post that "early public access" will launch in April.
...and of course it's in beta to a limited number of users right now.
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...and the Cybertruck range and launch date, and the Model 2, and the 4680 battery process, and...
Based on Musk's track record, you can pretty much count on this being a lot less than what is promised and a lot later.
I also just don't see the opportunity. I wouldn't call myself all that knowledgeable about WeChat and its ilk, but I think these "super apps" emerged as China's mobile revolution was taking off, meaning that people started out doing banking and ride sharing etc within these apps. In the US, all
Re:aka (Score:5, Insightful)
WeChat clone
Yes... like is specifically called out in the OP already.
I have similar thoughts about this kind of service as I do Tesla's someday "robotaxi" service... who is going to use it but a limited number of diehard fanboys? There's no way it becomes a de-facto anything if such a large portion of the population hates you and refuses to use any of your services or give you money. He might have had a chance 4-5 years ago before he REALLY went off the deep end... but now? No fucking way.
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I have similar thoughts about this kind of service as I do Tesla's someday "robotaxi" service... who is going to use it but a limited number of diehard fanboys?
People rent those Lime and Bird scooters and you can easily eat shit on them if you're not careful. If Tesla manages to make the service cost competitive with that (and no, the scooters aren't all that cheap to rent these days), they're in like Flynn. There's something to be said for being able to get out of the elements and not having to worry that an errant curb is going to send you to the ER.
Also, the average cost of a new car has been creeping up and it's not as if the US is becoming any less car-cent
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Makes perfect sense to compare a driverless taxi service to scooters rather than conventional taxis. It's almost as if you have an agenda.
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Makes perfect sense to compare a driverless taxi service to scooters rather than conventional taxis.
The "conventional taxies" ship sailed when Uber and Lyft hit the scene. Anybody who has been paying attention knew the human drivers are only part of a transitionary phase until the rideshare companies can figure out how to automate the driving part.
And I know from your sig that you think the technology will never work. Well, I remember a time not too long ago when the idea of running a search on my phone's photo library for "cat photos" sounded like impossible science fiction, too. In case I'm not makin
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Driver less taxis might be a big thing - at some time - in the US.
Because your country has no moral and bows to the cooperation over lords.
Perhaps they might be a thing in China, too. No idea.
I can guess, driver less public transport. Yes. But not a taxi.
Places like Bangkok ... no one really would use them. With your strange anti EV phobia in USA ... how exactly does a driver less taxi work? Auto fuel itself, tips to the corporation instead of the driver?
Most Taxi in Bangkok are private owned by a single pe
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Maybe its different in the US. But here in australia those scooters where disasters. They DID lead to a lot of people buying scooters of their own, but the rental ones tended to invade areas, get a bunch of people killed from drink riding (putting them in nightclub districts was straight up idiocy in my area) and other idiocy, and then get banned.
And while running people hated them. I was constantly having to interupt my morning commute to go and pull all the scooter
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I like the idea in principle. In practice it was a mess. I cant imagine it playing out differently elsewhere. I doubt any of these hire scooter companies are particularly profitable
It can be done. In the area I live you can only leave a scooter in a designated parking area. If you don't do so and verify with a photo taken when ending the ride you can be fined ~$20-30.
It significantly reduces the usability of the service (it's a PITA when you arrive at a parking zone to find that it's full) but also significantly reduces the negative impact on the general public.
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People rent those Lime and Bird scooters and you can easily eat shit on them if you're not careful.
Lime and Bird have no negative connotations about the company or CEO. They aren't in the constant news cycle for screwing their workers, fucking over their users, sharing of kiddy porn (just for some examples from Twitter). They aren't run (as far as any general member of the public knows) by someone who helped manipulate elections, completely fucked over several US government agencies, aligned themselves with neo-nazi pieces of shit (let's ignore the "salute", I'm talking about giving speeches at far right
Re: aka (Score:5, Insightful)
Hating Elon Musk is not partisan politics. These days only loving Elon Musk is.
Re: aka (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, reading half a sentence out of context. What the fuck happened to /. indeed.
There's plenty of people in the world to hate and much of it is justified. Like I really hate you right now for what you just attempted to do with this conversation, and it should be worth hating on.
But back to the point: It's not about politics. Elon is a lying grifting rich fuck. MANY of us hated him long before he showed any interest in politics. Many of us hated the man for his actions despite the fact that we actively loved his companies.
SpaceX: Brilliant - redefined what is possible in orbit. Tesla: Brought a world of new tech to the auto industry and should be applauded. Elon - A despicable piece of shit and we're all happy his companies thrived despite his best efforts to screw them.
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Yes, reading half a sentence out of context.
What context do you believe to be missing?
But back to the point: It's not about politics.
You like false dichotomies, so have them. Look at the question I answered. The argument you guys (yes, plural) made, and I'm arguing against, is that the only people who will use it are Elon fanboys. This is all that needs to be said to understand you and everything about you, plural. Remember this next time one of you guns down the next Brian Thompson or Charlie Kirk.
I, personally, have better things to do than spend all day on the internet nerd raging over what so
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What context do you believe to be missing?
Are you asking what context is missing in a reply to a sentence that is about whether something is partisan politics leaving out the partisan politics parts and generalising?
You like false dichotomies, so have them.
Given your level of English comprehension I don't think you understand what that phrase means. Hint: There's been zero false dichotomy in my reply in the context of this conversation. Context matters. Read a thread from the top before replying again.
I, personally, have better things to do than spend all day on the internet nerd raging
Oh the irony is so thick it can be cut with a chainsaw.
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If I was working at a company that required me to talk to Elon Musk I'd quit. Becuase that would mean I'm working for Elon Musk and he is a complete twat to his employees. Luckily I'm in a position where I'm not desperate enough to work for Elon Musk.
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Good lord you're tiresome.
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Does it hurt your head when challenged? Thinking is meant to require effort, go with it. Get out of your comfort zone.
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Ah yes, the big payout from being a high profile slashdot poster... who can resist is allure.
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I get it, hate is your schtick. It gets clicks.
Yes hate is my schtick, which is why I praised several things in my post. One other thing I hate is the education system which produced someone with your level of reading comprehension and reasoning. Note I don't hate you, I don't know you.
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Yes it's just a pure coincidence he simultaneously surpass many other car and rocket companies, despite them having much more money.
Not at all. Tesla rocketed past other companies due to their market position. On the flip side their sales and value have cratered due to Musk's antics. Musk has additionally taking an incredible personal interest in the design of 2 of his products: The Robotaxi and the Cybercab. Both are a failure, the latter of which even by Musk's own metrics, where he had to use SpaceX to buy out Cybertrucks, where he used xAI to buy out his Twitter purchase disaster, and then subsequently used SpaceX to buy out xAI, an
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Re: aka (Score:5, Insightful)
People who don't make all of life's decisions based on partisan politics.
If hating nazis and making choices to not fund their nonsense is "partisan politics" ... then sign me up!
And honestly, that's before you consider all of the lies and delays and missed deadlines and shifted goalposts of his entire "robotaxi" concept that may never actually happen at scale.
Re: aka (Score:2)
This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't imagine how Musk* is still unaware of this, but - he's not just unlikable, over the past ~ two years he's managed to actively poison how at least half of Americans view him. I frankly can't see how he'll ever recover from that - MAGA types will certainly continue to support him, but his circle of influence is gonna be rather constrained.
*(side note) or the Tesla board, for that matter
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Interesting)
I just don't want the place I bank and the places I make social media posts to be one in the same. It'd be no different if it was Reddit or Facebook, my money belongs far away from the reach of where I express my opinions.
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Interesting)
I am right in step with you on that - I wouldn't personally do it regardless of who was leading the charge.
But, honestly, I don't think most people think that way. If Musk had stayed in the background, this might've actually had a chance of succeeding.
(Also I see that I managed to piss off a Musk fanboi with mod points haha)
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
Just think of it as a means of controlling what people say.
Criticize the wrong nation state? No money for seven days.
But, ohh, that sweet sweet 5% interest rate.
These people actually upload their biometrics to foreign nation states to get a "reply boost".
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and absolutely nothing I do to have anything to do with Elon Musk, except champion his deportation.
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine saying something that gets you 'cancelled' and now you no longer have a bank account. You try to contact support, but it's just an AI that replies with shit emojis.
Yea I'll bank there.
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Me personally? No, becuase I would never use X.com, facebook, etc. Not even the slightest.
Most people though? No they will do both and that will be the outcome for some.
Personally I'm happy with SPAXX for liquid cash and the rest in a brokerage invested in total market index funds. It's liquid enough and for most of my life returned more than 6%.
So this is about Tesla stock (Score:4, Interesting)
So if you're starting to wonder whether or not Tesla's 7 year old car platform technology is going to be able to compete when Elon just took a Payday in the tens of billions of dollars or if you watched Patrick Boyle's video on SpaceX IPO and you know it's a scam now this kind of stuff is there to put your mind at ease with the idea that there's a entire another line of business Elon can make billions off of and protect your investment with.
It's basically a branding exercise leading up to a pump and dump. The cybertruck was the same way. Remember when it was going to be a $40,000 electric truck with a 500 MI range?
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So if you're starting to wonder whether or not Tesla's 7 year old car platform technology is going to be able to compete
Nah, I stopped wondering when it was revealed that the 4D chess move was the Iran war running gas prices through the roof. That improved the economics of buying one of Musk's cars, significantly. For all the "swasticar" talk, it's not as if buying gasoline supports a nicer sort of oligarchs.
The cybertruck was the same way. Remember when it was going to be a $40,000 electric truck with a 500 MI range?
The Cybertruck is a toy for people with more money than taste, as whatever this is supposed to be [cars.com] demonstrates. That just turned out to be a much smaller market demographic than Tesla was betting on. Disney made exac
Re:So this is about Tesla stock (Score:5, Insightful)
"it's not as if buying gasoline supports a nicer sort of oligarchs."
This is known as a false choice. It is also incorrect, buying gasoline does, in fact, support a nicer sort of oligarchs. There is no more malignant sociopath than Elon Musk, except possibly your other hero, Donald Trump.
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This is known as a false choice.
Because there are other EV makes besides Tesla? Well, yeah, but most of those alternatives would be compliance cars or wouldn't exist at all without Tesla having first demonstrated that there was a larger market for EVs than the established automakers originally believed. The company that produced the EV I own today (a Chevy Bolt) had previously shelved their attempt at an EV. [wikipedia.org]
Now personally, I wouldn't buy a Tesla, but that's mostly down to some of their baffling UI choices and pricing, rather than how I
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The car world had a big problem now. Cars are now bigger and heav
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This is known as a false choice. It is also incorrect, buying gasoline does, in fact, support a nicer sort of oligarchs. There is no more malignant sociopath than Elon Musk
Just because you aren't seeing the oil barons' personalities, that doesn't mean that they aren't even worse than Leon's. It only means that they are either smart enough not to be in public, or disinterested enough in us peons that they don't interact with us. They don't care if they set the whole world on fire in order to live a life close to kings, they are simply not better people.
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Insightful)
Musk is a really, really bad businessperson that got lucky once. He is also not very smart and not well educated. But at this tike he is part of a cabal that tries to subjugate free society and get filthy rich in the process. And they have not (yet) dropped him.
Re:This is almost certainly DOA (Score:5, Informative)
Got lucky a few times.
First launched into the vague area because Compaq had dot-com FOMO and gave Musk a ton of money for Zip2, and did nothing with it. Musk got millions for not much because Compaq had no idea how to evaluate things but was in a frenzied hurry.
Then he made a failing online payment service and effectively conned his way to be in charge of PayPal after a merger, and totally boffed it. Despite being ousted as CEO, he still ended up getting hundreds of millions for just generally screwing up.
Then bullied his way into being a 'founder' of Tesla, nevermind that Tesla already existed before he came along..
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I disagree to a point. You don't get to that position without being smart. Smart in this case doesn't mean having good business sense or a PhD in astrophysics, but being smart in how to manipulate people and how to turn charisma into investment. If he wasn't smart he'd have ended up in jail for fraud long ago.
Also he's been lucky more than once (Paypal, Tesla, and SpaceX are all examples of that).
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It's an interesting take on smart. I'm inclined to agree. There are many smart women who have no education, but a nice rack and manipulate old men into investment.
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"not well educated"
He has a degree in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, just like Donald Trump. So I guess you're right.;-)
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Did he get "second worst" before Trump who got "worst performance"?
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Correction: University degrees only means something if you performed well. And then they do not cover the whole picture. They are just one indicator.
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This is satire, yes? Just making sure, because there are actually people THIS disconnected from reality...
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So not satire then? Fascinating, the dumb cheering for the dumb. Musk is not actually an engineer. And yes, I am qualified to judge that. He might have invested a lot of effort to fake that image though. Like he faked being a "pro gamer".
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Put it this way: Is there anything in the source material you believe to be false? If so, what basis for it? What is your evidence of it?
So far the only thing you guys have produced are a few dozen false dichotomies and various other logical fallacies. Nothing substantive in any event.
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I see the popaganda lies work well on the dumber part of the population.
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Time will cure the backlash against Elmo, especially when the youngins who know nothing of him will gladly glom onto something they consider useful. I doubt most Americans know squat about him and if they do, it will be because he screwed up their SS with DOGE or because they "heard" he streamlined the federal government. The latter won't peek behind the headlines to understand how royally he screwed their privacy by helping to turn it over to Thiel and his merry band of Nazis.
This assumes Elmo can keep fro
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He clearly either isn't interested in organically building popular support for his app, or fundamentally doesn't understand that that can be done. But my fear is that he finds a way to force the issue, by finding things Americans *need* to pay for and arranging with his billionaire cronies for X to be the only convenient way to make payments.
This would be an extreme example, but imagine if next year it was cheaper to pay your federal taxes through X, because Musk gave Trump a gold-plated Tesla limousine or
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And if you are banned in X/Twitter, is your banking also disabled?
lol
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
I've recently been looking into India's digital payment system, Unified Payment Interface(UPI). It seems so good in so many ways. Direct INSTANT payments, person to person or merchant. Free! It really seems like the best system I've seen so far.
But, when I look at implementing such a system in America, I start to realize that credit cards offer features that India's system lacks. Buyer protection is one such feature. I can easily roll back a credit charge. It's vastly superior to direct bank debits.
Sure, the credit card system has caused price inflation as the ~3% that merchants have to pay is built into the price of goods. But that money is never coming back to the consumer. Even if the 3% is eliminated, the merchants will still charge the same and enjoy higher margins.
I guess that an instant digital system, like India's, is still vastly better than our present system of slow-ass cheques, debit cards, and ACH transfers. There's no reason why we can't have both a digital cash system and credit cards.
I'm hoping that Elon's system gives us the best of both worlds. But, I fully expect greedy fucks to turn it into just another consumer fleecing piece of shit.
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Direct INSTANT payments, person to person or merchant. Free!
Isn't that basically what Zelle is? The main issue with electronic payments in the USA is that there is no single universal standard and you basically have to ask someone what they're able to accept before sending. Personally, I prefer Apple Pay.
If someone tells me the only way they can accept digital funds is through X, I'm taking my business elsewhere.
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Yep, you've identified the problem: Banking systems in other countries are creating a national standard (like India did) for person-to-person transfers that doesn't depend on account numbers.
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Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
No, Zelle falls short when compared to UPI.
Zelle sends a notification of a pending transaction, not a confirmation of the transfer.
Zelle transactions can be delayed, sometimes hours. I've even read of days. UPI is INSTANT. INSTANT.
Zelle use usually requires the use of your bank's phone app and has varying individual bank enacted restrictions on accounts, amounts, commercial versus personal... UPI is app independent and works the same commercial or personal. If the bank participates in the UPI network(seems almost all do) then transactions all just work the same for all.
Zelle eliminates cash or cheque and speeds transactions. It is the best we've got, so far. But, it's still got an annoying amount of friction. UPI is almost completely frictionless and it's now ubiquitous.
Apple Pay will never incorporate Zelle. Remember the banks restrict Zelle use to their app. There's that friction again. Meanwhile Apple Pay is due to start in Indian soon and it will include UPI support on day one.
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Credit cards are not a good idea. The vast majority of the population would just misuse them, as can be seen in every country around the world. For those people, credit cards are a source of unnecessary debt.
Buyer protection can be implemented in law, no need for a credit card. Don't conflate the two ideas, the protection is merely a carrot to entice people onto credit cards.
With a cash system, provided it clearly displays the wallet's current balance, people are better able to judge when they've run o
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Elon's sytem can never be that because the whole idea with India's system is it was built and mostly operated by a State-Owned-Enterprise. [wikipedia.org] so is not really a profit taking business, it's there to facilitate transactions and thus provide a service for all the rest of the profit seeking economy.
Payment processing as is structured here in the US is a form of rent-seeking and thus an economic drag. There's a good case to be made for standardizing it the way India has even if it does come with challenges and drawbacks.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Yes functionally it is really good but, much like the Aadhaar [wikipedia.org] biometric ID system, the direction of travel is that it becomes so ubiquitous you are more or less forced to use it.
In a country where you actually have things like rule of law, separation of powers, freedom of speech and assembly, this might be ok. But both Aadhaar and UPI are moving towards 'data maximization' [scroll.in] and user profiling at govt/state level, with your spending and service utilization data being shared with an opaque group of favored providers [ndtvprofit.com].
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I start to realize that credit cards offer features that India's system lacks. Buyer protection is one such feature.
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. Buyer protection should not be a feature of a corporate product. It should be a feature of the law.
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You're not the first in this thread to tell me that I my thinking is wrong because you think a non-existent law should be.
I'm simply working within the framework of what's available to me. Without an existing law, then I depend on the credit card for its buyer protection feature.
I don't get to make the laws. If I did get to make the laws, you might not love it.
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I don't have or want a debit card. I have an ATM card that I can use for physical cash the one or two times a year I need it. It was actually quite hard to find a local bank that still offered ATM only cards.
The actual protection of credit cards makes them the best way to buy everything. I get 2% cash back on every purcahse so that ~3% isn't even a concern to me. I get to float my monthly spending for a month in SPAXX so I may even come out ahead. If I'm making a very large purcahase, I just either cut a ch
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Sure, the credit card system has caused price inflation as the ~3% that merchants have to pay is built into the price of goods. But that money is never coming back to the consumer. Even if the 3% is eliminated, the merchants will still charge the same and enjoy higher margins.
I for one would be happy to see the smaller merchants (who are the most abused by the CC duopoly) get their 3% back.
X + Musk + MyBanking? (Score:4)
That is all.
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Your money is TOTALLY safe in X (Score:3)
Re:Your money is TOTALLY safe in X (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm wondering is if they are going to do this as a dodgy pseudobank. Like a lot of those money transfer services that aren't technically Banks but function as Banks and therefore are very much illegal but you know, it's an app so it's legal now.
It will never cease to amaze me how much you can get away with just by calling it an app. Like, we're not an assassin's guild we're a technology platform!
Re:Your money is TOTALLY safe in X (Score:4)
The argument will be that its not a bank, (I mean, who wants to trust those things?), and the money is merely travelling in a conveyance
Re:Your money is TOTALLY safe in X (Score:5, Funny)
The argument will be that its not a bank
100%. They will fight tooth and nail to not be considered a bank (and therefore not have to be regulated as one). Though, really, at this point in the game of US politics, even if they do try to regulate it, he can surely just offer a "donation" to kill any potential enforcement - or even kill the regulation itself.
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What I'm wondering is if they are going to do this as a dodgy pseudobank. Like a lot of those money transfer services that aren't technically Banks but function as Banks
Why would anyone expect Elon Musk, the co-founder of the well respected company PayPal, to create a dodgy pseudo-bank and skirt laws?
Note to some of the thicker readers: This post is sarcastic.
What I like best about muskrat (Score:2)
He really is the epitome of the modern American billionaire. A grifter who has produced absolutely nothing of value but convinced ever
More pump and dump (Score:4, Interesting)
But this will briefly get a bunch of people excited and help Elon raise some extra money. It'll help keep the Tesla stock price up because a lot of people think of anything Elon does as being Tesla. Which isn't that far off because he repeatedly and routinely mixes his companies and ways that are very illegal but well, we stopped and forcing laws a long time ago. I'm sure that's fine.
Now if you excuse me this guy named Chesterton has a fence he wants taken down.
I know better (Score:5, Insightful)
Phones can be lost, stolen, and hacked. My phone has never seen a single credit card number, nor have I ever logged in to any bank with it. Letting any app have access to my money is never going to happen. I know my home pc can be hacked, but it's a linux box; I know what's going on with my home network and all the devices on it. Not so for phones. I'd say Elon can kiss my ass, but he'd have to pay me a LOT to do that. Eeeewww.
Re:I know better (Score:4, Informative)
I use a dedicated laptop for banking and it's only turned on for banking then shutdown and it doesn't have anything else on it. No browsing or anything else is done on it.
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Dang, you don't use single-use burner laptops for banking? Careless! Mine are gold-plated.
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I simply use my old non-gold plated laptop. Less junk to the recycle bin.
Re: (Score:2)
Phones can be lost, stolen, and hacked.
Money transfer services have been proven to be incredibly secure to the point that literally no one is stealing phones for the purposes of attempting to hack them to transfer money.
Fraud is far easier to do through social engineering.
Stealing money is far easier to do through phishing campaings and app squatting.
Phones are far faster to wipe and flip on the black market than to try and engage in advanced hacking that is often foiled by something even as basic as a lock screen.
You're talking about the stuff
Processing fee (Score:3)
Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases
That's about the same as merchant fees, meaning the transactions themselves are probably a loss leader once you factor in all the stuff like fraud and dispute resolution.
I'm guessing Musk sees the real value as the dataset of shopping behaviours. Either that or that cash back rate is going to plummet once the service gets established.
Re: Processing fee (Score:2)
Almost certainly a disadvantage (Score:2)
for anyone who uses X for everything. Why?: A walled garden where the services cost more than if you sought them out on your own.
The only way prices are kept under control is if there is a broad market for products and services being offered.Once that is walled off you will only have the choices offered in the walled garden unless you want to do business outside of the app. Musk is betting nost people will be gullible enough not to notice, and/or won't care.
Musk is isn't the first or last person to attempt
Too little, too late (Score:2)
Hmmm (Score:2)
So... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Why do so many people leave off the ending?: "Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.”
Digital company town (Score:2)
DOGE coin (Score:2)
I was naive Tesla believer. Autonomous driving is coming real soon. No radar needed cameras can do it all. Autopilot works (except when the name leads people to think it's actually autopilot and kills people)
He was bitching about bits on twitter and other bullshit. Bought Twitter and called it something dumb and no it's a cesspit of AI b
I guess his bank is... (Score:4, Informative)
..the Reichsbank?
Misleading (Score:2)
Musk, who first rose to prominence in Silicon Valley by co-founding PayPal
He cofounded x.com, which was losing to Cofinity's PayPal, and got replaced by Bill Harris within months. Then when Cofinity merged with X.com, for whatever stupid reason they allowed Musk to be in charge again, and then within months replaced him as he about destroyed the merged entity.
Re: (Score:2)
It's weird to credit him with Paypal and Tesla (that formed without his involvement, and in the case of Paypal he founded a *competitor* that lagged Paypal before being folded into Paypal) and also OpenAI, where he was indeed a part of founding it but walked away from it well before anything vaguely interesting happened with it.
Either the *actual* founding counts to give him credit for OpenAI and the actual founders of Paypal and Tesla get credit, or being there when it makes it big counts, and OpenAI does
And then the tech sorcerer whispered... (Score:2)
"And you will give me access to all of your financial information for data mining and better application of advertising potential."
And while all those who heard recoiled in shock and disgust, the world gave a collective sigh and said, "OK."
Because, for whatever reason, when these absolute shitlords demand access to things they have no right to, everybody seems to just go along with it without a single thought.
Elon is Late - One App to Rule Them All (Score:2)
"cofounded paypal holdings inc" (Score:2)
X can't be google (Score:2)
Google and apple have already done all this stuff. Plus they run the OS business for mobile. Why would anyone switch from something that's been working for years to something Elon thinks he's inventing? X is a trash-land garbage-fire shitstorm. There's a lack of information quality out there on the internet, and X is about as good at providing you with useful information as Facebook or Joe Rogan podcasts, Fox News, etc.