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Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision:

X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.

There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.

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Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app? I already don't use twitter and there are market leaders that would have much better service (given they aren't trying to do every single thing in the world) compared to X and also, most of those services pretty much stink, so I would never think that X, while trying to do everything in the world, would also be better.

Well, you wouldn't do it by choice. I guess Musk really wants to build the WeChat equivalent for America, where to get anything done you really have to go through his app. They don't need to be best - they just need to make it inconvenient to not use it. And yes, it's an awful vision of the world.

>Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app?

Because it would be incredibly convenient. Link a restaurent to your friends in a chat, talk about going there, all of them have the location and you can split the bill, all in the same app.

It might not have the best business index, or the best chat, or the best map, or the best payment manager, but it would be far, far superior to trying to coordinate all of those services through different apps.

And it's not that you need to want all of this, it's that if people around you use it you have enormous pressure to use it as well, because in the previous scenario if you are the guy who doesn't use such app then you have to be catered to specifically through and through, which is annoying for everyone.

>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more

Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise

Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.

How dystopian. Why not just build the matrix and be done with humanity.

Having more competition for YouTube and WhatsApp doesn't seem so dystopian to me?

I wonder how this jives with his stated plan to lay off a lot of people? If he wants to implement that he'll need a lot more engineers and related support staff.

I think this was mostly bluster, sure hell have to lay off a lot of people to change the company direction but his pitch to investors said the company would grow to like 12000 people.

Then he's in real trouble because he's taken on a whole lot more loans, and Twitter is not growing that quickly and liable to actually shrink now. The US market for it is saturated.

If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.

Yeah, he’s said a lot of conflicting things and put himself in a precarious position. I both wouldn’t be truly surprised if he grows twitter nor if he laid 75% of people off on Monday.

It should be noted that there's no evidence that Elon ever said that.

There's a cluster of things around transport and then... also Twitter? I get that in the end you want to do everything but what makes microblogging a more important day 1 feature than food delivery or gaming or online dating. It's like if Amazon did just book delivery and online photo storage.

He could just buy Uber for another 50 billion and he'd be more than halfway there...

the everything-app thing would be significant if realized, the thing about that is it has to compete not just against all the tech giants, but also against all the smaller companies who are already mostly succeeding in those verticals. having to install another app isn't really an impediment to acquiring users.

it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.

It sounds like we're back in 1999.

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