Daily life in Chinese cities is nearly impossible to navigate without WeChat, to the extent that being barred from the country’s super-app has been likened to a “digital death”. Commonly described as a smartphone messaging platform, it is more like several apps rolled into one, used for messaging, social media, payments, subscriptions, utility bills, food deliveries, plane and train tickets, ride hailing and much more. It is owned by the Chinese tech giant Tencent.
And Elon Musk would like a rebranded Twitter to be just as indispensable in the west.
Last weekend, he announced that the social media platform, which he bought for $44bn last year, would be renamed “X”. The world’s richest person has a long history with the X brand, having called his online banking business x.com before it became PayPal in 2000.
Now he wants X to become like WeChat. Shortly before buying Twitter, Musk wrote: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” In a tweet on Tuesday, Musk wrote that Twitter had already changed significantly from its early days by offering video as well – now more change is on its way.
“In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” he wrote.
Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2023
The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like…
In June last year, Musk told Twitter staff that the company could emulate WeChat.
“You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success.”
Some of the mini apps within WeChat are operated by Tencent directly, while others are from smaller businesses that have partnered with Tencent to get direct access to WeChat’s 1.2 billion monthly users.
There is no parallel in the west. “Imagine if you used OpenTable, Uber and Deliveroo entirely inside the Facebook app, using your Facebook identity and a Facebook payment account instead of a credit card – and then you paid for coffee and paid for the tube with it as well,” says Benedict Evans, a tech analyst.
WeChat’s payment function allows users to pay for goods from within the WeChat app. Users simply have to scan a merchant’s QR code to pay for a good using “cash” in their WeChat wallet, which is connected to a bank account. Users can also easily send money to each other via WeChat messages. Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s chief executive, has said payments and banking will be a focus for the rebranded business.
Fascination with the everything app idea is not new and has been on western tech execs’ minds for years. It was reported last year that Microsoft has considered building a “super app”. Bruce Daisley, the former head of Twitter’s European operations, says he went on holiday to China in 2018 and was captivated by WeChat.
“It’s impossible not to be intoxicated by WeChat and the hold it has got on Chinese life, from messaging people to ordering cabs and paying for things,” he says.
Daisley says it is a “slightly flawed premise” to presume that because everything apps have emerged and succeeded in China the same will happen elsewhere. He adds, however, that making payments a key part of a rebranded Twitter platform – a clear ambition of Musk’s – could work in the US, where the online banking and payments set-up is less well developed than in the UK and Europe. The question is whether you would trust Musk with any payments process, Daisley says.
“When it comes to banking, most of us want slightly boring apps where we put our money,” he says.
Daisley also argues that Twitter has become a more toxic brand under Musk, which lessens its appeal as a financial service provider. “The idea that I would use an app that I find more jarring under Elon Musk’s ownership, that I would trust it enough to put my money into it, is fanciful.”
Lucy Ingham, the head of content at FXC Intelligence, a data company, says there is a logic to Musk’s ambitions for the platform.
Large numbers of people already link to payment options on their account profiles, she says. “There are lots and lots of people who ask for money through Twitter … a version of Twitter could make a commercial play with that,” she says, before adding: “You can have a really good product and a really good system, but if people don’t trust it, it’s not going to happen.”
Analysts also point to structural barriers for an everything app in the western world. Tencent was able to build WeChat in China more than a decade ago when the market there was still in flux, whereas in the west there are well-established players in individual sectors of the digital economy, such as Google in search, Facebook in social media and Amazon in e-commerce.
Evans doubts whether a western app would want to hand over control of its customer experience to a Musk-operated everything app.
“Why would you hand over your destiny to a third-party platform? In China you have to because everyone is on WeChat. Twitter has a very small user base,” he says, adding that Musk has shown himself to be a “very unreliable partner” since he bought Twitter.
Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist at Twitter, says Musk’s ambitions could be difficult to carry out after the Tesla CEO axed 80% of the platform’s workforce. “Setting up an entire payment structure is so labour-intensive and he has cut [the workforce] to the absolute bone. To set up a payments app seems fanciful at this point.”
Musk is adamant, however, that the platform he bought for a vast sum of money faces its own digital death if it does not change. Some of the advertisers that generate the vast majority of its revenue have either halted spending or reduced it sharply, the company has a debt burden of $13bn and Musk has dropped the brand that made Twitter a force in social media.
He has to hope that users will accept the looming transformation and give the platform another life.
