X is best known as a place where people argue about politics. Elon Musk has always had a different idea about what it should be. He wants it to handle your money too. This week, that idea moved closer to becoming real.
X Money, the payment and banking service built directly into the platform, has been opened to a wider group of paying subscribers in the United States. The announcement came from Dhruv Batura, who leads the X Money division. He said the company would roll the service out in stages. It wants to collect user feedback and iron out problems before making it available to everyone.
This moment has been a long time coming. Musk first described his payments ambitions publicly in 2022, shortly after he took ownership of what was then called Twitter. He said then that payments would be a core part of what he was building. He compared his ambition to WeChat, the Chinese application that hundreds of millions of people use every day for messaging, money transfers, shopping, booking taxis and paying utility bills all in one place. The idea has a name. Musk calls it an everything app.
For a long time the vision stayed on paper. The months passed. Competitors continued growing. Musk promised a public launch by April of this year. April came and went without one. The company said it needed more time to get the product right. Now the expansion is under way. And the product being offered is genuinely competitive.
Users accepted into the current rollout can send money directly to other X users. They can hold a balance inside the platform without needing to move money elsewhere. They earn three per cent cashback on qualifying purchases made with the X Money debit card. That card is physical and made of metal. It carries the user’s X account name on the front. There are no fees for spending abroad. Cash held in the account earns interest at six per cent per year. That is roughly fifteen times the rate most American savings accounts currently offer.
Behind those features is a serious piece of infrastructure. X has obtained money-transmitter licences across most of the United States. It partnered with Visa to process card payments. Cross River Bank handles the underlying deposit accounts. Money held in those accounts is protected up to $250,000 under American federal deposit insurance rules. These are not the moves of a company dabbling in finance. They are the foundations of a product intended to operate at the scale of an established financial institution.
As reported in its coverage of the latest expansion, X Money is also designed to benefit the creators who earn money through the platform. At the moment, payments from subscriptions, tipping features and other in-platform earnings are processed through external payment systems with their own delays and fees. X Money is intended to route those earnings directly into the creator’s wallet in real time. For people who rely on X for income, that change could matter considerably.
The market X is entering is large and competitive. PayPal handles payments for roughly 430 million users worldwide. Venmo, which PayPal also owns, has around 90 million active users. Cash App, owned by Block, counts approximately 57 million. Apple Pay and Google Pay are embedded across hundreds of millions of devices.
X brings something none of these competitors have in the same way. It already has 600 million monthly active users on the platform itself. It does not need to persuade anyone to download a new application. The payments layer is simply appearing inside something people already use. That is a significant structural advantage.
The full roadmap goes further still. Later in 2026, X plans to introduce tools for investing. Lending products are also planned. The company intends to add support for digital currencies including bitcoin and Dogecoin. A shopping marketplace is being developed alongside international expansion. The goal is to keep adding until switching away from X to handle everyday financial tasks feels unnecessary.
Not everyone is confident it will work. One analyst told financial media that Musk had been promising this vision for years and was arriving later than planned. Getting people to trust a social media platform with their savings requires something that cashback rates alone cannot provide. That something is a track record. X Money does not yet have one.
The answer to whether the everything app can really be built around a platform that started as a place to post short messages will arrive gradually over the months ahead. The rollout has started. The ambition is enormous. The proof is still being gathered.
https://www.storyboard18.com/how-it-works/elon-musk-expands-x-money-after-delay-moving-closer-to-his-everything-app-vision-102430.htm
