The X.com domain name, for a considerable time Sunday, was just displaying a holding page for domain name registrar GoDaddy because it hadn’t been configured correctly.
Musk claims to be acting on an original vision for “X” that he has had since he bought the X.com domain name in 1999. Later, wise people advised that PayPal was a better name for a payments provider. That advice would help earn Musk his fortune.
EMULATING ASIAN SUPER APPS
Decades on, Musk is still fixated on “X”, apparently not content with it being merely the name of one of his children. Evidently lacking sensible people in his ear, Musk now thinks the X name can help transform Twitter into a super app in the mold of China’s WeChat. The Tencent Holdings service has around 1.3 billion users and combines multiple services within one immensely powerful app.
Other examples include Grab, which offers rideshare, food and financial services in Southeast Asia.
On the surface, it should be straightforward to emulate the success of those apps, particularly with the head start of owning a popular social network that people check multiple times a day. But the promised land of a US super app has been elusive to companies bigger, richer and smarter than “X”.
Western consumers, as well as being more stuck in their ways when it comes to payments and banking, have proven less amiable to having one company control so many things in their lives.
The conditions that made super apps work in Asia, where many people’s first experience of the internet was via mobile, not desktop, simply do not apply in the markets Musk thinks he can target.
Source: CNA
