X partners with Visa to enable money transfers on the platform | Hacker News Reader

X partners with Visa to enable money transfers on the platform

washingtonpost.com

30 pointsmacleginn66 comments

This has been Musks goal for a long time.

But while trying to accomplish it he's burned the goodwill and much of the public perception of Twitter/X as a good company.

I certainly have a highly negative view of Twitter/X and wouldn't trust the platform with any financial information or using it for financial transactions no matter who its backed by, but that's reflected in my not having a Twitter/X account to begin with so its a moot point.

I get him, but why Visa?

As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way. I also suspect the primary use of this may end up being scams, which seems like a really bad market to get into.

Now not only can you fake having cancer or whatever, you can ask for donations in-app! Or let people help you in your fight against $EVIL_THING by donating to your cause (no matter how real or not) without leaving the site. Or you can just peddle your new sponsor $WONDERFUL_THING.

If it’s not primarily used for scams, seems likely to turn the platform into a big begging space. Before you had to convince people to go to IndieGoGo or your site or whatever.

I know this has always been his dream. I just don’t see a likelihood of it making anything better. And I’d say that for any social network. Maybe Meta hasn’t done it because they realized that would likely be the case?

Also, "why Visa" from the X.com perspective. As far as I can tell, Musk's vision was WeChat for the Western world. The platform for everything. WeChat replaces Visa, it doesn't use Visa or a competitor. If X.com is using Visa then Visa is the platform, not X.com. Using Visa feels like an admission of defeat to me.

I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of financial compliance. Musk was part of PayPal which has gotten into trouble before for being not quite a bank and attempting to do bank-like things.

Yes, it's hard. That's the point. Visa is a monopoly that makes monopoly sized profits. (Visa's $20B of income is misleading, that's tiny compared to the profit the banks issuing Visa cards make).

If Musk could crack the Visa monopoly X.com would be worth a lot more than the $44B he paid for it. He's the richest man in the world because his companies do hard things.

Landing a rocket on a barge bobbing in the ocean is difficult. Tesla not being on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man... is difficult. Sending 280 character messages across the internet is not difficult in comparison. Breaking the Visa monopoly, OTOH...

>Breaking the Visa monopoly, OTOH...

Musk has consistently pushed his companies into higher risk acceptance and financed those moon-shots to deliver a product that had a demand but not a supply (reusable rockets, electric cars, low-orbit internet satellite network). Also the tunnel thing, neuralink, and a handful of other smaller and less successful gambits.

I don't see him having the same benefits tackling financial transactions. There are already multiple players with significant regulatory capture, significant centralization, on top of established reputations.

Financial payments is a cartel wherever you go. In China it's not better, it's just different players; AliPay and WePay. In fact UnionPay is probably more of a cartel since it's the only card authorizer in China.

A couple of companies have tried their hand at a western mega-app, most notably Meta, and you could consider Apple close, but for the most part the consumers are not super interested.

And X wants to join the list of cartels, not to break them.

Visa and Mastercard are very strict on merchants (so in this case Twitter), when it comes to any kind of fraud. So this I would take as a signal that Twitter will have to completely clean out frauds. Selling directly through Twitter will then give a high level of fraud protection to customers.

Compare this to Instagram and Facebook, where over half of all paid advertising are outright frauds, and where their policy is to allow frauds even when users have reported them.

Letting customers purchase directly on social media instead of social media just being ad platforms for scams could be a positive thing. Meta would have to go the same way then. And maybe – maybe – we can move on from the ad/scam/bot hellscape into a system where social media platforms are instead funded by taking a percentage on direct sales from businesses selling there. That would be a much healthier system for everybody involved, except for scammers and ad professionals.

>As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way.

Ok, but what if he gave you a billion dollars plus promises of billions more in transaction fees? If that wasn't enough, what if we promised 2 billion plus fees? At what point would your (Visa's) terror be offset by your (Visa's) greed and fear of giving this profit opportunity to a competitor (MasterCard/AmEx)?

> I get him, but why Visa?

It seems a crazy business decision for Visa. There was an advertiser boycott in 2023-2024, why would Visa choose to get involved?

The brand is completely wrecked and now associated with things that mainstream advertisers and businesses rightly want nothing to do with. This feels nearly like Stormfront or 4Chan announcing a partnership with Visa. Wild times!

>As a company I’d be terrified to be tied to his brand in any way.

It is VISA or MasterCard in Europe. Not like we have much choice. Whether it is MasterCard or VISA is outside your control as it is tied to your bank.

Meta has already done this with Whatsapp payment.

> But while trying to accomplish it he's burned the goodwill and much of the public perception of Twitter/X as a good company.

Has he? If we step out of the echo chamber of HN and Reddit he is immensely popular. I was actually shocked around the holidays seeing many friends and family that are not internet junkies have a very strong overall opinion of Musk.

Yes he's getting more unpopular by the day. Polls show his popularity among the American population is plummeting, according to CNN analyst Harry Enten.

Enten said Tuesday on Erin Burnett OutFront that Musk's net favorability rating in January had dropped to -13 points. This was down from -3 points before the election and a sharp fall from his +29 rating in 2016.

An Associated Press-NORC poll published last week found that 52 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of him, compared with 36 percent with a favorable opinion. This marks a decline from a 10-point negative rating the previous month.

Of course like everything else it is very partisan... , a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that Musk still enjoys widespread support among Republicans, with 75 percent of Republican respondents saying they viewed him favorably compared to 90 percent of Democrats viewing him unfavorably.

My very non-technical family that doesn't use HN or Reddit has a very negative view of him now.

It really comes down to politics. His cozying up to Trump and showing his 'true colors' has turned off a lot of 'regular media' consuming people, non-republicans as well as people outside of the US that dislike Trump.

While there are some that like him, his popularity is dropping quickly.

> If we step out of the echo chamber of HN and Reddit he is immensely popular. I was actually shocked around the holidays seeing many friends and family that are not internet junkies have a very strong overall opinion of Musk.

This has not been my own experience. In most of my offline circles he is regarded poorly, or at least as a joke.

Here's a hypothetical:

1) you put a bunch of money "in" this

2) you say something on twitter Elon dislikes

3) you get banned

4) you lose access to your money???

Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen

Sounds like PayPal.

If everyone who says something bad about paypal would be banned from paypal it would have no users left!

Take issue with their policies as much as you want but it's telling that almost no one even knows who PayPal's CEO is. That's how it's supposed to be

It's because Musk got his feelings hurt. When PayPal formed, he and his money transfer idea were thrown out because he wanted to make a service doing exactly this and name it "X". Many of us predicted this happening.

Didn't he say he wanted to do this? I'm not sure how much predicting was necessary.

He’s been trying to make an everything-including-payments thing called X for decades.

He did say he’d do this with Twitter, but as GP points out it wasn’t a new idea for him then.

This is a “keep doing the same thing until it works to prove I was right and those others who forced me out were idiots with no vision” kind of a thing.

Yes, he also said people sending payments on Twitter would become 50% of the world financial system (lol)

I was expecting Jack Dorsey to do this with Twitter and SQ/Cash App (since he was the founder and CEO of both of them) ages ago, but it never happened. One of the most baffling losses of steam and vision in my life to watch him do so little for so long.

I swore off Square long ago because I made a handle using the names of me and my wife to let people contribute to a honeymoon fund when we got married and then after a couple friends contributed, Cash banned my handle and support wrote me back only one time and then was forever afterward silent and never restored my account, and I thought, "Great, another Silicon Valley app where the goal is to provide as little support as possible, only it's not about photos or email, it's about money, so that seems like the worst fit for Silicon Valley where they don't like to lift a finger to help you with anything!" Ever since I've seen zero reason to use them over a sea of viable alternatives. My stodgy old bank lets me use Zelle, and my stodgy old bank answers the phone when I call. I can also drive a few minutes to talk to them face to face if there is a real problem with my MONEY.

As a Canadian who has worked in the US for a bit, something I always find strange is the American aversion to Zelle. E-transfers are the equivalent here, and everyone uses it and as it's rolled out over the years, I've definitely seen the literal delight from people learning they don't have to download a new app, make a new account, anything else. But every American insisted I make a venmo account, when both of our bank accounts supported Zelle.

As an American, I've never understood it either. I've watched family and friends spend hours setting up Venmo to send each other $20 when both of them already have Zelle built into their banking apps. It makes no sense to me.

It’s a mystery to me why Meta / Facebook failed to integrate native payments into their products. They had 10 years and carte blanche to do it, but nothing happened. And what happened to Libra ?

Libra was shuttered due to feds saying “we have no legal reason to stop you but we still wish you to stop” and Zuckerberg (after some things we are not privy to) agreeing. There was a submission on this from an insider sometime in the past year.

(IMHO: no loss to the world whatsoever.)

I wonder if they'd be eyed by regulators for doing so, but yes, it does seem odd they didn't at least integrate Paypal or similar.

They do exactly this all over the world. Look at WhatsApp Pay.

Yeah that they do it globally but not in the US (other than a kind of meagre payment transfer on FB that used to exist) makes me wonder if they were bullied, federally, into not doing so.

A simpler explanation is that US doesn't have the banking infrastructure to support these kinds of micropayments. ACH transfers take 3-5 days and require you to link a checking account. Debit & credit card transactions have high fees. Chargebacks/fraud are a constant problem. So no payment processor wants to take on this complexity and liability.

It's not easy to form a bank, look at Walmart who has been trying for decades.

And here I was thinking the main point of social media was socialization.

Is splitting bills/sending money to your friends not socialization?

On Mastodon, it is.

Money talks.

Partnering with visa is not an alternative. This does nothing for the issues of debanking and financial censorship.

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42854715

Maybe it's an American thing, but I really can't see the point of this. Or PayPal.

PayPal was definitely a useful thing years ago. Now, online payments are way better than they used to be. Before though, PayPal was a nice layer to send money without checks. I got some of my earliest internet payments via PayPal when it still felt sketchy to receive money online.

That said, PayPal (the product) is much less useful now IMO with Venmo (I know they own it now) and all the digital wallet payment services.

Actually, I use PayPal more now than I ever did in the past. It's a competitor to Apple Pay and Google Pay. Apple Pay only works on Apple devices, and I'm often on Linux, so it's a fantastic alternative to having to type in my payment information to many smaller stores. I actually prefer it over using Apple Pay even if I'm on my Macbook.

Venmo, Facebook Messenger payments, PayPal, CashApp, Zelle, now X.

These are all symptoms of a complete failure of our (US at least) banking system to provide a secure, nice to use system that is universal.

The closest we get is Zelle and it's a complete joke with vague mechanics that are sometimes-email-sometimes-phonenumber.

My personal bank's integration to Zelle is clunky and takes about 10x as much effort vs Messenger pay or Venmo.

Keep in mind Zelle was created by a consortia of big banks.

The result is about as good as a consortia of giant banks is going to get.

Especially now that instant and free bank transfer are mandatory in the EU

Free bank transfers are not mandatory in the EU. The bank just has to charge the same for a national transfer as an EU transfer: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...

I think the free here related to payments within the country. I now understand and it sounds like X payments wouldn't be relevant to me.

Makes no sense in the Us either though with basically everyone having access to Zelle.

I have both a US and an Australian bank account.

Zelle sucks compared to what's considered table stakes overseas.

This makes no sense. Elon Muk hase nough money that he doesn't need to partner weith Visa at all. Especially in the EU all he has to do is acquire a license for an E-Money Institute.

This is nothing but a glorified patreon or twitch subscription.

And this is the functionality that makes social media sites worth it for the vast majority of people. They are there following people who are there to make money. The vast majority of people involved in social media are primarily or secondarily there because of money. So this move makes sense.

And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users. The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites. That's not a bad thing, but it does mean tha "alternative" social media really needs to stop chasing these kinds of users.

> And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users. The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites.

Sure, if you ignore the simple fact that Twitter reached > 100M users when it had zero money transfer feature for the end users.

>And this is the functionality that makes social media sites worth it for the vast majority of people.

The feature no major western social media site has had is the one that make it worth it for the majority of users?

Seems like an extreme claim without any backing or logic behind it.

I think you're right with what you say about "alternative" social media.

> And that's why decentralized, federated, or whatever social networks will never gain a large scale (>1 million or so) users

This is fine. If we have 500 decentralized social networks and 2 centralized social networks, it's awesome.

The decentralized networks will be harder for people to make money off of, but not impossible. That's also good. You can use the big soulless social networks for moneymaking, then return to the smaller ones for actual genuine social interaction.

> The governments of the world will never allow non-corporations to provide the money transfers necessary for people to "make a living" on such sites.

Before the Internet, we had money orders. You can still get them and cash them. In the 90's I used to order stuff via mail using money orders. It's riskier, but I'm not sure it's very much more riskier if you are dealing with someone you are following that has a group you are a member of. It is less convenient.

I really don't get this. Why would I want to send money via a social media site, especially twitter in its current state?

Because you can use actual value to incentivize what you want to see rather than "cheap" likes. At the same time if you provide posts that are valuable to others, then you receive value back. I don't like the exclusive solution that X is building where majority of people will be excluded from participating, but you asked about the "why".

This is what the Nostr people have been saying, and it's also why I've avoided Nostr even as a fairly strong Bitcoin advocate. I don't go to social media to transfer money; I go to social media to freely exchange information with my social peers.

This is what facebook used to be. You only see your social peers, you don't see any other "famous"/well known people that you don't know personally. This could be done on nostr quite easily, but it's just too tempting to start following the famous personas.

Hm? I thought most people were on social media for, you know, social things: sharing photos, discussions, etc. Sending money is an important social activity, but I can't think of a single time I've wanted to use Twitter (when I used it) to send money -- the circles of activities weren't heavily overlapping.

(This has nothing to do with politics or decentralization or anything else.)

“Social” means people, and “media” means videos begging for money.

I’m sure this will work out great.

centralized services can execute on "give every user a wallet", but federated services and protocols can also add an attribute to piggyback on the addressbook that is inherent to a following/follower relation. Subscriber tiers and encrypted content is harder, but the peer discovery is already there.

sounds like you have no friends to connect with if you're there for money.

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