Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), has an ambitious vision to transform X into an ‘everything app’, similar to China’s WeChat. This transformation would mean that X would not just be a platform for posting content, but also a hub for various activities such as making calls, texting, shopping online, banking, and sending payments.
Musk’s vision for X is to make it the only app a user would ever need in daily life, thereby increasing its profitability. He believes that this transformation could potentially turn X into a trillion-dollar company. However, achieving this vision is a challenging task, and X is still far from becoming an ‘everything app’ like WeChat.
Despite the challenges, some experts believe that X is well-positioned to become a super app. Sangeet Paul Choudary, a global expert on platform economics and network effects, suggests that X could succeed if it avoids certain missteps, such as adding features that do not leverage the unique relationship between accounts and followers that made Twitter popular.
Currently, when you open the X app, you see a pair of social media feeds that you can toggle between—the ‘for you’ and ‘following’ feeds—as well as options to post, search, and use Grok, X’s chatbot. If you click on your profile in the app, you can access a separate menu to jump to other X features, like Spaces or Communities, or, if you’re an eligible creator, you can check out how the monetization of your posts is going.
The path to transforming X into an ‘everything app’ is indeed an improbable one, and it remains to be seen whether Musk’s ambitious vision will become a reality.
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