Elon Musk wants to create an “everything app” as well as a “Super App”; what is it?
The idea of having an all-in-one app, commonly called”super apps “super app” is extremely popular in Asia, and many tech companies around the globe have attempted to imitate the concept. What exactly is it and why would Elon Musk want to create one?
What is the reason Elon Musk suddenly thought about the creation of an “everything app” and what exactly does that mean? The idea came up on Tuesday when the billionaire executive at Tesla Inc reversed course on his previous decision to not purchase Twitter Inc. Musk is now able to go ahead with the original plan of buying Twitter for $44 billion. Late on Tuesday, he tweets: “Buying Twitter is a catalyst for the creation of X the app that covers everything.”
The idea of having an all-in-one app, commonly called”super app, “super app” is hugely loved in Asia, and technology companies all over the globe have attempted to imitate the concept.
What’s a great app?
Super apps, or what Musk describes as an “everything app” is called the Swiss tool of mobile applications. They offer various services for users, including messaging, social networks as well as peer-to-peer payment, and online shopping. These apps are extensively utilized in Asia since mobile phones are the main method of connecting online for numerous people living in Asia as noted by Scott Galloway, a New York University professor of marketing and co-host of the technology podcast “Pivot,” last year.
What are some great examples of apps?
Chinese popular application WeChat is home to more than one billion daily users as per an estimate. It is a regular element of everyday living in China. Users can hire taxis or cars or pay money to family and friends or pay at stores. In the year 2018, some Chinese cities started testing WeChat to test an electronic identification system that could be linked to the accounts of users according to The South China Morning Post.
Grab, a top super-app across Southeast Asia offers food delivery, ride-hailing on-demand package delivery, and investment and financial services.
What is the reason Elon Musk wants to make an awesome application?
In a session of questions and answers during a Q&A session with Twitter staff in June of this year, Musk said there’s no super app similar to WeChat beyond Asia.
“You mostly live in WeChat in China,” he said and added that he saw an opportunity to develop an app similar to this.
In addition, adding more tools and services on Twitter could aid Musk to achieve his ambitious growth targets for the business. In the Q&A session for employees, Musk declared that he wants Twitter to expand from 2,373 million followers to “at minimum a billion.”
Musk and his inner circle texted numerous times over the idea of introducing digital payments to Twitter according to the messages published in the process of discovery in the litigation that is pending between Musk and the company that runs social media.
Did other US tech companies consider this?
Sure, Snapchat parent Snap Inc had previously launched peer-to-peer payments, known as Snapcash, and then ended the service in the year 2018. The company also pushed mobile gaming but then put an end to that endeavor as part of its cost-cutting strategies.
Meta Platform’s Facebook, as well as Instagram, have also attempted to extend beyond social networking and messaging to include e-commerce.
Twitter will help to accelerate this over the next three or five years.” The first X.com was among the first banks to be online that was co-founded by Musk in the early months of 1999 in the midst of the dot-com bubble’s initial peaks. Musk’s initial start-up, Zip2, an online directory of local businesses was just transferred to Compaq for more than $300 million. A multimillionaire newly made, Musk invested $12mn -the majority of the earnings of his Zip2 sale, after taxes -to X.com.
He imagined it eventually becoming a single-stop-shop in financial solutions, ranging from consumer bank accounts to insurance brokerage and brokerage services. In the year following, X.com merged with its competitor Confinity and in 2001 the business was rebranded as PayPal. When it was sold to eBay at $1.5bn in 2002 Musk was able to earn around $80m which gave him the money to invest in the electric car company Tesla and to build SpaceX, his rocket-powered company. SpaceX. In the past, Musk has suggested that he views X.com as an unrealized chance to be “the central location for all transactions”. Musk told the biographer of his Ashlee Vance that he thought of “trying to win PayPal to return”.
“If you have all of your financial transactions integrated seamlessly in one location, it’s extremely simple to perform transactions and the charges for transactions are minimal,” Musk is quoted in Vance’s 2015 biography. “Why isn’t PayPal making this happen? It’s crazy.” In recent times, PayPal has made bold moves to create a “superapp” to process payments. However, Musk’s idea of blending Twitter and X.com seems to go more. The presentation he gave to investors earlier in the year laid out Musk’s plan for Twitter which included PayPal-style payment between users as well as cutting down on advertisements and charging certain users for a subscription. Musk predicted that more than 100 million people would sign up with an X subscription in 2028. “You are basically living in WeChat within China,” Musk told Twitter employees during an all-hands gathering held at Twitter in the month of June prior to his attempt to pull off the deal. “If we can duplicate this with Twitter then we’ll have a big accomplishment.” Musk is not the only US tech entrepreneur who has tried to make an outside of China an app that is similar to WeChat that blends social media with commerce.
Meta Chief Mark Zuckerberg has striven to make Facebook Messenger into a platform to play games, pay for, and shop and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel has also attempted to mold Snapchat to fit into the WeChat image by creating mini-apps. Both have not had the same kind of success as Tencent’s WeChat is the dominant Chinese internet, with more than 1.2bn users. Visitors on the X.com domain will only see the lowercase letter “x” against a white background. However, should Musk is believed in his claims — and it’s not always the case for the entrepreneurial shrewd entrepreneur may one day be much more. The idea of relaunching X.com will be “something I’ve been thinking would be extremely beneficial for a long time”, Musk said in August. “I have a plan for what I can do . . . I believe it’s something that can be extremely useful worldwide.” He said: “I do use Twitter frequently. It’s not as if I’m just randomly wandering around looking to purchase companies or anything.”
