Elon Musk, the controversial owner of the all-in-one app X (formerly Twitter), is planning to revolutionize the digital payments landscape by introducing in-app payment services to the social media platform by mid-2024. The billionaire did not mention any crypto integration for these new payments.
I don’t spend much time thinking about cryptocurrencies. Barely at all.
Elon Musk
During a conversation with Cathie Wood from ARK Invest on December 21st in a space X, Musk expressed his desire to fully launch these payment services by the “middle of next year”, pending approval of several money transmission license applications. However, he acknowledged that the path to this launch had been hindered by bureaucratic processes and that X had submitted all the necessary documents a bit late.
The Future of Payments on X
No major obstacles are anticipated for the money transmission license applications according to Elon Musk, but the billionaire emphasized that he had not anticipated so many bureaucratic hurdles. Despite his previous enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies, he recently admitted to spending “very little” time thinking about digital assets, although Tesla holds around $148 million in Bitcoin and accepts Dogecoin for additional purchases on the Tesla Shop.
Reports from 2022 also indicate that The Boring Company, another Musk enterprise, has started accepting Dogecoin for rides on its transit system in Las Vegas. These moves suggest a continued, yet cautious, adoption of cryptocurrency in Elon Musk’s businesses.
In the same discussion, Musk discussed his vision of money and digital assets as a “database for resource allocation”, stating that fiat currency is “actually quite fine” as long as state actors don’t attempt to devalue it by manipulating its supply. Additionally, he shared his ambitions for the AI system Grok, aiming to make it the funniest language model capable of even insulting upon request.
