Assuming Elon Musk goes through with his takeover of Twitter, he’ll have to make a real business out of a company that lost almost half a billion dollars on $5 billion in revenue last year and trails TikTok and Snap in audience reach. He envisions something bigger. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted on Oct. 4.
Imagine a platform for banking, payments, stock trading, crypto investing, professional and personal services, news, entertainment, and retail—an amalgam of the Apple app store, Netflix, the Salesforce platform for app developers, Tradeshift and PayPal.