X Plans to Launch ‘Money’ in Limited Form This Year

While Elon Musk’s plan to convert X into a payments hub, from which many expanded functions will arise, has seemingly been delayed in its initial approval process, X is still pushing ahead with the concept, which it’s now calling “X Money” as opposed to “X Payments”.

Earlier in the week, in a post welcoming the new year, X CEO Linda Yaccarino noted that X Money would be among several launches planned for the coming months.

I’m not sure that any of these are going to “connect you in ways never thought possible.” But hyperbole aside, the mention of X Money suggests that X is still pushing ahead with this, despite not reaching Musk’s original timeline of a 2024 launch.

That’s at least in part because X hasn’t been able to gain a money transmitter license in New York, which Musk himself identified as a key state for its initial payments push.

X has been granted payment transmitter licenses in 38 U.S. states thus far, but X withdrew its application for a license in New York early last year, after a legal filing was made in opposition to its payments push, which questioned the “fitness and character” of X to hold such authority.

The main concern noted within that filing is that X has “troubling and deep ties” to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, due to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman being an investor in Musk’s X project. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the filing alleges, has a long history of brutality and repression, which it claims have been “fueled and enabled” by the platform itself.

That, seemingly, has impeded X’s capacity to gain approval in all U.S. states. But now, according to new findings in the back-end code of the app, X is planning to push ahead with X Money anyway, by launching it in selected U.S. states to begin with.

As a quick recap, Elon’s “everything app” vision for X stems from the ubiquity of WeChat in China, with Chinese users effectively using WeChat as their digital identity for all kinds of transactions. As a base comparison, wherever you would use your credit card, most Chinese people use WeChat instead, which provides various benefits for citizens, in terms of convenience, while also establishing WeChat as a foundational tool for everyday interactions.