Elon Musk’s social media company, X, said on Tuesday that it was teaming up with Visa to provide financial services, in a step toward Mr. Musk’s plans of expanding it into an “everything app.”
The new financial feature, called X Money Account, will enable peer-to-peer payments from users’ debit cards and allow users to transfer funds to their bank accounts, Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, said in a post. The service will be available later this year, she said.
“First of many big announcements about X Money this year,” Ms. Yaccarino added.
Mr. Musk made financial services part of his pitch for X when he bought the company formerly known as Twitter in 2022 and promised to turn it into an app for payments, ride-hailing services and more. But progress on adding a banking component to the app has been slow, in part because X needs licenses from each state to transfer money, alongside other regulatory approvals.
The Visa deal will allow X to skip that step, transferring money on Visa’s network rather than obtaining its own licenses.
A spokesmen for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Visa Direct will make it possible for U.S. X Money Account users to fund and transfer money in real-time with their debit card,” a Visa spokesman said in a statement.
Mr. Musk has experience with financial apps. He helped start the online bank that later became PayPal.
X makes most of its revenue from advertising. But the billionaire, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, has long promoted plans to make X more independent from advertising by transforming it beyond social media — much like WeChat, a popular app in China.
In a pitch deck circulated in 2022 to bankers financing his acquisition of Twitter, Mr. Musk said the social media app would bring in $15 million from a payments business by 2023. That business was projected to grow to about $1.3 billion by 2028.
Ad dollars, which made up more than 90 percent of X’s revenue at the time of the acquisition, would be replaced by subscription businesses and fees from the payments business, Mr. Musk’s pitch said.
But most of those plans are as of yet unrealized, and the platform still heavily relies on advertising.
Mr. Musk has prompted backlash from advertisers at times, including in late 2023 when he used a crude word to insult those who had pulled back on spending on the platform because of his actions on the app.
Stacy Cowley contributed reporting.
