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 replied to a user who said it would be easier to start X from scratch, because he said that Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years.
Musk co-founded X.com in 1999, which was initially an online bank. 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 X.com domain name and relaunched the site.
Musk tweeted after the CEO of Tesla said during the annual meeting of electric vehicles in August that he had a grander vision for what X.com or X corporation could have been.
Musk said it's 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 have to have Twitter for that, but I think it's going to be very useful to 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 that is 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.
At a town hall with Twitter employees in June, Musk said that he wanted Twitter to reach one billion users and that he planned to replicate WeChat's model, noting that people in China basically live on the platform.
He said if we can recreate that with Twitter, we'll be a great success.