Elon Musk says Twitter bought WeChat, it could have helped accelerate X

Elon Musk said Tuesday that his decision to buy Twitter for $44 billion is a major factor in the creation of X, the Everything app. He said that it would have been easier to start X from scratch, because Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years.

X.com was an online bank that Musk co-founded in 1999. A year later, it was merged with the software company Confinity Inc. and changed its name to PayPal.

In 2002, eBay bought the electronic payments provider for $1.5 billion, and in 2015, PayPal was spun off into an independent company.

In 2017 Musk bought the domain name X.com and relaunched it.

Musk's latest tweet came after the CEO of Tesla said during the annual meeting in August that he had a grander vision of what X.com or X corporation could have been.

Musk said it was a pretty, pretty grand vision. That could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years. It's kind of like something I thought would be useful for a long time. He said that he knew what to do. I don't need to have Twitter for that, but I think it's going to be very useful for the world, because I think it's probably at least a three-year accelerant. Musk floated the possibility of making X.com Twitter's competitor if the deal didn't go through a few days after the meeting.

Musk is not the first to consider creating a so-called Everything app.

WeChat, a Chinese app, used for messaging, calling, payment and other functions, was created by Tencent Holdings. Since its initial release in 2011 the super app has amassed over 1.2 billion users.

Musk said at a town hall with Twitter employees in June that he wants Twitter to reach one billion users and he planned to replicate WeChat's model, noting that people in China basically live on the platform.

He said that if we can recreate that with Twitter, we'll be a great success.