At the X all-hands meeting last week (Oct. 26), owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino listed all of the features they plan to offer on X (formerly Twitter) to make it an “everything app,” from banking and hiring services to 4K livestream capabilities. The X executives said they would start to broadcast these internal meetings to the public every quarter via livestream.
According to a transcript of the meeting published by The Verge yesterday (Oct. 31), Musk and Yaccarino mentioned YouTube, LinkedIn, and PayPal—which originated from Musk’s fintech startup, X.com in the 1990s—among the competitors they’d like to replace. Outside competing with social networking sites and financial services, Musk also talked about X’s new audio and video call capabilities and encrypted direct messaging, all made to replace FaceTime and Signal.
Here are the top takeaways from the all-hands:
Turning X into an online bank comes from Musk’s vision for PayPal more than 20 years ago.
Musk said his plans for X.com, the precursor of PayPal, weren’t fulfilled when he sold the company to eBay in 2002. X.com was an online bank cofounded by Musk in 1999. But the company eventually focused on digital payment under the leadership Peter Thiel. (Musk left X.com in 2000 following its merger with Confinity.) With X, Musk looks to expand beyond digital payment and offer full banking services. He said X would implement these features it by the end of 2024.
Musk claims Community Notes and livestream can combat media bias and misinformation.
Musk said he wants users to be able to livestream on X in 4K quality and be able to watch X on TV in a similar way to YouTube. Musk, who is often at odds with journalists, said his vision for streaming is that X users will be able to get their news from people who are at “ground zero”—who live stream news events on X as opposed to “going through the lens of media.” He cited the ongoing Israel-Hamas war as an example of how X is being used as a source, though reports show that misinformation about the crisis is rampant on the site during this time.
Musk and Yaccarino also spoke about X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to submit corrections to posts that could contain false information. In the conversation Yaccarino emphasized a comment from Musk about “people being force-fed certain types of media that have certain types of bias.” Musk claimed Community Notes will be the “single best source of truth on the internet.”
Musk and Yaccarino touted X as a future hiring and dating site.
Musk also envisions X to be a go-to site for job hunting and finding romantic partners. He and Yaccarino touted X Hiring, a recently announced feature that will allow verified organization accounts to post job listings on the site, as an effective method for recruiters to find candidates, suggest that a user’s profile and posts would essentially be their work portfolio.
The same idea would go for dating. Musk spoke about how he and other people he knows had found romantic partners on Twitter in the past and how users can determine good matches based on a person’s posts. Musk met Grimes, his ex-girlfriend and mother of two of his children, on Twitter in 2018.
“I think we might be able to improve the dating situation. Part of it is how do you discover interesting people? Discovery is tough,” Musk said.