Twitter Filing to Become a Paypal-like Payment Platform

The Financial Times reports Twitter has been applying for the necessary licenses to become a payment platform in the US.

Esther Crawford, Twitter’s Director of Product Management, has been working on the infrastructure of the new service.

In November, 2022 Nextbigfuture reported on early license filing.

Twitter has filed with a financial regulatory agency to process payments. This is the start of Elon Musk going back to his Paypal plans. Elon Musk had visions for reinventing finance with Paypal.

Elon Musk will now use Twitter to realize those previously abandoned plans.

Elon wants to integrate all financial data into one database, create all financial and banking services into one highly responsive and fully digital system.

Elon wants to create a payments system where all of the money is.

The Twitter fundraising pitch deck includes a plan to get what will be a new product to over 100 million users by 2028.

Jack Dorsey, Chairman and principle exec of Block [aka Square] , is working with Elon Musk at Twitter. The head of Binance, largest crypto exchange, is an investor in Twitter.

The vision is to democratize and decentralize all of finance.

Elon is talking about his Twitter payments plans.

Elon says they will give every Twitter user a payments account. He plans to make all of the services and site as useful, entertaining, fun and easy to use as possible.

8 thoughts on “Twitter Filing to Become a Paypal-like Payment Platform”

  1. Meh. Remember Google Wave? No, of course you don’t. That was the project to reimagine Email. Instead of the body of each message (‘wave’) being a text message, it could be an image or spreadsheet or document that the message receivers could collaborate on.

    The project was cancelled because it was pointless. Instead of creating a message with a spreadsheet payload, why not just create the spreadsheet and send the invite however you want?

    Twitter for payments will go the same way. Twitter is for sending one-to-many messages. Not ideal for most payments. Twitter can send one-to-one messages, but many other platforms can do that job better.

    Just create the universal finance platform anyway. Don’t bother trying to shoehorn Twitter into it.

    • The point, of course, is to leverage the preexisting userbase into the platform, which you otherwise have to cajole people into.

      • Exactly. WeChat slapped on payments, because friend circles need small payment systems periodically. Once that is up, scaling it is easy.

        Elon is obsessed with WeChat being a SuperApp ecosystem. There are some advantages from it being a defacto monopoly on digital payments in china, froma systemic standpoint and an economic standpoint, since it reduces friction in transactions.

        The one thing Elon could innovate on is true micropayments (less than a dollar, ideally less than a cent). If you could pay 0.1 cents for a digital article, would you pay? Would you be willing to tip 0.1 cents for a helpful article?

        Naturally, Elon would be skimming parts of cents everywhere and skimming off the top too (low payment volume would be fee-less but once it gets to a substantial amount fees would kick in), bankrolling the system by charging the big fish while letting the little fish swim freely.

        • What amazes me is American banking doesn’t have free, instant transfers like most of the world. If that were in place, there wouldn’t need to be a bunch of competing cashapp, venmo like stuff. It’s a band aid on a deep wound.

          • America has a lot of problems that stem from being first in a large number of domains, and getting essentially locked into the first system that worked, after which changing is difficult. Whereas countries that are way behind the bleeding edge have a bit more freedom to do things differently when they start doing them.

            Musk isn’t actually proposing to just challenge Paypal. He’s proposing to challenge the whole banking system, and their practice of having vanishingly low interest rates on savings. He’s said any balance maintained on his payment system beyond some very low minimum would earn money market like returns.

            There’s no reason banks couldn’t do that, they just mutually agree not to.

            A key question here, is Musk going to complete every last legal transaction, or is he going to cave to demands to ‘curate’ transactions? One of the reasons I abandoned Paypal after being an early adopter is that they decided that they were going to pick and chose what you could spend your money on; If you wanted to spend it on anything they disapproved of, they would refuse to complete the transaction.

            Now companies like Visa are starting to adopt similar practices.

            If Musk’s system is going to stay out of the way of user choice, I’m in.

            • This is the first I have heard of ‘curating transactions’.
              What sort of purchases were they not completing the transactions for?

              • Paypal has a record of cancelling the seller accounts should you deal in stuff like
                (here I listed a bunch of stuff. But then my comment mysteriously got disappeared. So I’ll be vague this time)
                – Photos of young ladies who can’t afford clothes
                – Devices for putting holes in things at a distance
                – Competitions in which one might end up with more money than one started

                But there is also a couple of cases where Paypal revised their user agreement to say in fine print on page 26 that they would straight out fine you, remove money from your account, up to $2500, if they caught you saying something naughty, even on a totally different part of the internet. Not just sellers, but ordinary buyers too.
                They then got a torrent of abuse and pushback. And their response was “Oh what? Oh, we didn’t mean to write that. Aren’t we a silly rabbit? We made a typo that’s all.” then removed the offending clauses.
                Just do a websearch on “Paypal terms of service scandal”

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