X is now licensed for payment processing in a dozen U.S. states | Hacker News Reader

X is now licensed for payment processing in a dozen U.S. states

techcrunch.com

66 pointsmikece85 comments

Elon has long been on record saying that he wanted to create the "Everything App" -- he wants to turn X into the WeChat of the rest of the world (starting with the US). The cynical side of me thinks that if he pulls it off he will have created a tool of perfect surveillance as well as convenience.

Rather the surveillance tool is in Elons hands than someone else

he's done some really impressive things by pushing the bounds of what's possible/legal

i absolutely don't trust him to put user privacy/protection over product development. he thrives off outlandish predictions and aggressive deadlines. user protection is the first thing to go when that's the case

Has Elon actually done anything? It seems like he just buys stuff then takes credit for things that happen to do well. I am not sure he even does things in the traditional sense of a CEO directing work towards an intended vision. The most successful companies that Elon happens to be a CEO at are the ones that do the best at managing Elon and working in despite of him. The only thing he has been good for is spending money and generating hype by himself being outlandish.

So the more money he spends and the more money he generates through investments with the least amount of personal involvement is going to create the most successful company that he happens to be a CEO at.

> Has Elon actually done anything?

I mean, conclusively proving this either way requires A/B testing with a time machine, but I think it's hard to argue SpaceX would've managed to get Falcon 9s reusing their first stage without Musk's driving it. Reusable spacecraft does genuinely to be his thing, even if he's not doing the technical work.

Rubbish. He's clearly driving the engineering culture at both Tesla and SpaceX and has a fantastic knack for getting people to try new things and push boundaries.

Is he actually designing rocket engines himself? Of course not. Is he directing workers towards his vision? 100%.

He may be an arsehole with an ego the size of Mars but the idea that he is stupid and doesn't "do" anything is naive and wrong.

You figure he’s driving the culture at SpaceX more than Gwynne Shotwell is?

Yes. I used to work at a huge company owned by one man. He may not have run the day to day business but he still had enormous cultural influence because he could override any decision.

Not this drivel again. The man deeply understands his rockets, and is heavily involved in the design of them.

And no, he doesn't take credit for all the work, either. For example, find any NASA post-launch conference and the first words out of his mouth are always "I'd like to thank the SpaceX team and our NASA partners...", usually followed by the anecdote about how the company wouldn't exist today if not for NASA's willingness to believe in SpaceX after their first successful launch.

Ya'll really need to lay off the haterade, or at least dilute it with a little bit of reality. The dude gets a lot of (arguably well-deserved) hate, but that doesn't justify flat out inventing reasons to hate him.

The largest customer of SpaceX is the US Government; the largest customer of Starlink is the US Government; what makes you think the largest customer of X data mining and analysis won't also be the same as the above?

It might the largest customer, but I am not sure it's a majority customer. According to SpaceX, several months ago they had 1 million paying customers. Assuming the cheapest price they are bringing in $100 million a month.

Is US govt paying them $100 million a month?

> Is US govt paying them $100 million a month?

https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tesla-government-money-...

"SpaceX alone got a whopping $2.8 billion in government contracts last year, according to The Information, and has gotten a total of $15.3 billion from the government since 2003."

$2.8B in a year is $233M/month, and I'd wager it's gone up since then with SpaceX's ever-increasing launch cadence.

Isn't this confounding Starlink and launch capacity?

You are confusing it with Starlink. SpaceX has all sorts of contracts with NASA and the Space Force.

But we are talking about Starlink customers. It's definetely not 100 million a year or even close.

If you are bundling "the US Government" as one entity, then you already have absolutely 0 hope of any privacy. If you think the US Government teams in charge of purchasing space transport are concerned with your data, you're pretty mistaken.

Why?

I'd rather no one has any surveillance tools on that scale.

It's weird, though: I supremely dislike Musk, but I do think he might be a less-bad steward of that kind of tool than a lot of people/corporations.

Then again, he also throws a bunch of tantrums, so I expect he'd eventually weaponize that kind of view into everyone's lives. Probably in childish ways, not your garden-variety discrimination.

I think he would approve of a mostly open-sourced system that removes anyone's ability to manipulate data where most other people would see dollar signs for selling data

The problem isn't "who is the steward" but that there is a steward other than yourself, over stuff that you are supposed to be in charge of.

Your priorities are not someone else's priorities.

Besides you don't have to trust Elon Musk, you have to trust Elon and everyone else he trusts, and also everyone that he and they accidentally let in.

I disagree. I think Musk is right up there in the group of entities that absolutely should not have that power.

The "everything app" can mean an app that does everything, an app that everyone uses, or both.

It's totally possible that X expands its feature set while its audience and cultural relevancy continue to decline. I would not be surprised if it stabilizes at some point as a moderately profitable medium-sized tech company. But it's never again going to be the global phenomenon it was a decade ago.

I'm confused. You're comparing Twitter's audience today to 10 years ago and you think it has _declined_? How confident are you on that?

It looks like twitter has about twice the global users as in 2013, but there are like twice the internet users globally than in 2013 and ~5 countries make up half their users.. So it seems pretty accurate to me that they are further from global relevance than in 2013.

That’s not what I wrote.

Old Twitter had that "relevancy" because it was was blessed by the regime. It toed the line and supported the messaging that those in power wanted to be put out. Now it doesn't do that, so it's become even more important, even if seemingly less relevant to those still worshipping inside the church.

Which regime? Keep in mind that Twitter was a huge factor in Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign.

One reason it mattered so much is that no other platform could do what it did. Now, many can (including Truth Social).

Don't play dumb. I mean the regime, the one with its hands on all the levers.

The one that wants you to pay attention elsewhere.

I still think no other platform can do what Twitter does. None other has the same reach and cultural relevance. Now it's been purged, it's positioned to be a real force for good.

Niche alternatives like Truth are sideshows.

> an app that everyone uses

Wouldn't that be the "everyone app"?

And in any case, I assume Elon would want both.

Facebook wanted to do this with Messenger too.

If they couldn’t do it, I see no reason to believe that X can.

But doesn't WhatsApp basically do this? Just not yet in most of the world.

What does it do beyond messaging?

I'm not familiar with WeChat but whatsapp has some business features and also payment integration at least in some countries. Not that far from this description of WeChat: "WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing. "

As far as I know, the business features it has are just messaging related.

You might want to read the Wikipedia article you’ve quoted to understand just how broad of a feature set Wechat actually has.

Payments: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1293279751500598 (people and businesses)

Microblogging (Channels): https://faq.whatsapp.com/549900560675125

I think Status is sort of like Snapchat with ephemeral microblogging?

All the typical voice/video/group video/screen share stuff.

You can use WhatsApp to make purchases both in the app and the real world?

From Wikipedia: "[In 1999] Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal."

Apparently he kept the x.com domain and never lost the desire to be a bank?

He didn't keep the x.com domain. He purchased it from PayPal in 2017. [1] Indeed at the time Musk tweeted Thanks PayPal for allowing me to buy back http://X.com! No plans right now, but it has great sentimental value to me. [2]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/10/15949862/elon-musk-x-com-...

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/884580654117076992

The critical difference here is this is being attempted by the guy who was kind of behind PayPal, Tesla and Spacex.

The guys who are trying to make Messenger an everything app are probably some random MBA grads who have done nothing of significance in their life and real world.

It's more about ability to make change in real world to improve human condition. Facebook has 0 expertise when it comes to this.

Only thing Facebook has expertise is in building web pages, servers and running AB tests to make humanity keep scrolling down and stare at bullshit.

> PayPal

X.com*

> who was kind of behind PayPal

Musk was nowhere near "kind of behind PayPal".

Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.

Confinity had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything.

Then they merged with Musk's company. Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.

He remained CEO for four months, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.

The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.

Apropos of the recent OpenAI clusterfuck, think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family"), let alone while you're on your honeymoon.

> The guys who are trying to make Messenger an everything app are probably some random MBA grads who have done nothing of significance in their life and real world.

The head of Messenger when this happened was literally the ex-president of PayPal.

https://time.com/2850224/paypal-david-marcus-facebook-messen...

...on his satellite network?

I mean, WeChat is a great surveillance tool. I guess he was just more literal than we expected when he said he wanted Twitter to be WeChat.

I don't know. That's pretty much exactly what I expected when he said that.

Given X's trajectory it's more likely to become the "nothing app".

I'm sad that basically all Elon/X threads are now full of nearly exclusively lowest possible effort garbage and that no real discussion occurs.

On the topic at hand, it seems obvious that the direction of X is that of authentication (X being where you sign). This news is further proof of that. Along with the checkmark changes among others.

I get likes now on my tweets and replies! Except they're all bots :)

That's what happens when the face of the company is publicly obsessed with online culture war politics.

But they'll freeze your account if you post something negative about Elon.

There are hordes of people on Twitter criticizing Elon, Tesla, Elon's twitter purchase, Elon's political comments, etc. Last time I checked, they still have their accounts.

This isn't some silly hypothetical; he's demonstrably banned accounts he's mad at before. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-start...

Seems like those accounts violated a rule around doxxing. The account that tracked Elon's private jet in real time was banned and those accounts were linking to it on other platforms.

You can disagree with the rule on real time doxxing, or argue that it is irregularly enforced, but your comment seems to be a kind of misinformation where you omit the causal link.

The rule was made afterwards. It was a retcon to justify his actions.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjk5yx/elon-musk-had-his-mos...

> On Wednesday, Twitter chief Elon Musk banned accounts he said he never would in order to protect free speech, made up new rules to justify it, threatened legal action against a 20-year-old, pontificated on how doxing is banned on the platform, and then immediately posted a video doxing a man and asked his 121 million followers to identify him.

> Twitter then retroactively added a new policy that banned accounts "dedicated to sharing someone's live location."

He had previously publicly promised not to ban the account.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

It is very clear that if Musk wants you off Twitter enough, he's kicking you off Twitter.

No, Twitter clarified a policy against doxxing that had previously existed.

If I gave you a list of accounts banned by the previous owners and said "Dorsey banned these guys because he was mad at them!" And then it turned out the accounts were all racists, it might be true that Dorsey didn't like them, but the reason they were banned was the racism and that's true even if Twitter had to post hoc clarify their terms of service.

Analogously, sharing the current location of celebrities, automated in real time, is clearly problematic behavior and related to doxxing which is already against the rules. That's what those accounts were banned for, and again, you are simply lying by trying to conflate the cause.

Confident but evidence-free assertions, but again, Musk's promise not to ban the account remains online. You can take a look if you like.

You provided "evidence" in the form of news articles that directly refuted your own claims. The articles explain why those accounts were banned.

It's fine that you dislike Musk for whatever reason but you shouldn't lie about him and it is a lie to say that he banned accounts he didn't like and use examples where he banned people for violating the rules.

> You provided "evidence" in the form of news articles that directly refuted your own claims.

I directly quoted the news article supporting my claims. You can say black is white, but it's not very believable when people can just scroll up and look.

Selectively quoting from the news article to omit the reason is exactly what I'm accusing you of.

Protip: if you really don't want to admit defeat in an internet argument, it's usually a better look to just stop responding. Let me paste the quote for you:

> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk - @elonmusk

They weren't "tracking his jet"; it's already being tracked, they're just surfacing the already-available data.

Here's one example https://themessenger.com/tech/elon-musk-bans-popular-poster-...

Another: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

Ahh, then the FAA is doxxing him, then!

Before you talk about that Elon tried to keep his jet private above and beyond that:

* the jet is registered to a company with a very SpaceX-y name

* the registered office of that company's street address is "1 Space Drive"

* when you search that address, Google reports, "Businesses associated with this address: SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company".

Last time I looked they were all talking about jumping ship to Mastodon and Bluesky.

How many actually have is anyone's guess.

> How many actually have is anyone's guess.

What's certain is that the rest of the world chose Threads instead as the viable alternative.

Other than Threads, the rest of the so-called Twitter / X alternatives are just as relevant as the skeletons and fossils underground.

Will I get free money if I post something positive?

I guess they can go build their own payment platform?

Somehow he'll find a way to make a service even more cantankerous and unpredictable than PayPal.

This is literally not true

Dude has skin thinner than a sheet of graphene.

Except when it is.

There seems to be plenty of criticism on there, he probably never sees it because it's from non blue checks.

Mainly be careful not to say the forbidden words cs and decolnization

I would be more afraid of X banning my account for posting something that violates a random British, Saudi or Chinese law.

Fundamentally, no one should want banking and social media being in the same place. All it takes is one belligerent government to apply pressure.

We already saw Canada freeze bank accounts of people who were protesting in the capitol. I don't need the possibility of my speech locking my account.

It’s remarkable to me that this would not only lead to competition with PayPal (founded by Musk) but also with Cash App, founded by Dorsey. The article does not even mention this second point, which in my opinion represents a huge lost opportunity for Square and Twitter, who could have had the same partnership when they were both doing well and run by the same CEO.

It does happen that tech CEOs found companies that compete partially or completely with their prior creations. Usually at that point the founder CEO only owns a small portion of the company, and the new company might give them the opportunity to capture a larger fraction of the market. They already know it well, having participated in it a few years ago, and there might be structures in the prior company that might prevent them from pulling off their success in that one.

> with PayPal (founded by Musk)

Sigh. PayPal was not founded by Musk. PayPal was a Confinity product, and had an MVP, and trademarks, before Musk entered the picture, was CEO for four months before the Board fired him on his honeymoon.

Musk's primary "contribution" to PayPal has been collecting dividend checks.

Hah actually yeah didn’t realize the full history here, it’s actually tied back to x.com in a full circle way:

> In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. Musk was optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business Confinity was developing. Musk and Bill Harris, then-president and CEO of X.com, disagreed about the potential future success of the money transfer business and Harris left the company in May 2000. In October of that year, Musk decided that X.com would terminate its other internet banking operations and focus on payments. That same month, Elon Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of X.com, which was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and went public in 2002.

Anyway, my comment was more about Square and Twitter and how I wish they’d formed a partnership of some sort.

Tucked away towards the bottom, among the speculation that this could somehow tie into ad revenue sharing:

> The company also lost a deal with Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media, which would have seen the celeb tout live audio, live video and live shopping on X. Musk lashed out at Hilton after the deal went south, but the departures could spell trouble for X’s monetization plans, and therefor its creator economy and payments ambitions.

Remember, advertisers - if you don't do business with Elon, he'll shit talk you in twitter.

Hypothetical interview: Host: So Elon, what do you think about the creditor banks? Elon: F-u!!!1 is this clear enough?!?!

They need to create a compelling reason to switch from existing payment methods to X, which seems to be mostly absent at the moment.

A decade ago I'd have said they could target specific markets like hiring artists, but there are now companies targeting those niches.

Finally! I can entrust all my banking to a company that fired most of its SREs! What could go wrong?

$44B is a lot of money to burn through just to create a shittier AOL.

Eh, no. Never would I give Twitter and Chief Twit my bank details.

ugh when you tech bros are all driving around in your smart cars broadcasting unregulated tracking data to a centralized place and people are tweeting about it you’re going to rethink whether or not it should be allowable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com