The transformation of Twitter into something other than Twitter has reached, as they say, a new phase.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter and still known as Twitter by most people who use it, announced this week that it has begun offering payment services to its American subscribers. The feature, called X Money, allows users to pay rent, send wire transfers and reimburse friends for dinner, which is to say it does what Venmo does, and what PayPal does, and what the money-sending function of approximately seventeen other apps already does.
The service arrives through a partnership with Visa, which will provide subscribers with a physical debit card — a tangible artifact from the financial system that Elon Musk has spent much of his career attempting to render obsolete. The card can be added to Apple Pay, which is a different company's attempt to do what X Money is now attempting to do.
Mr. Musk has made no secret of his admiration for WeChat, the Chinese super-app that combines messaging, payments, shopping and video games into a single interface through which, by some accounts, a billion people conduct significant portions of their daily lives. "If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat," Mr. Musk has observed, with what appeared to be genuine admiration.
The payment feature is available only to Premium and Premium+ subscribers, a group that currently represents approximately 0.21 percent of the platform's user base. (One imagines the percentage was calculated with some precision.)
Whether American consumers are eager to conduct their banking through a social media platform that has experienced, shall we say, an eventful few years remains to be seen. X also introduced a standalone encrypted messaging app in April, which suggests the everything app is being assembled one something at a time.
Original story published in mediapost.com: "X, Visa Launch Payments App For U.S. Subscribers 07/29/2026"