Elon Musk has detailed his vision for turning X, formerly Twitter, into an “app for everything,” including payments, creator tools, shopping and more, since acquiring the social network more than a year ago . Now, the company is committed to a time frame. In an announcement today, X shared its roadmap for the coming year, which will include AI-powered experiences and the launch of peer-to-peer payments, among other initiatives.
While Musk’s time frames for product launches don’t always hold up, X has moved to acquire the necessary licenses to handle payment processing in recent months. As of December, X was licensed to process payments in twelve US states, and today that number stands at 14, with the recent additions of Arkansas and Pennsylvania.
According to Musk’s vision, X users will be able to send money to others on the platform and withdraw that money to certified bank accounts. It also toyed with the idea of offering users high-yield money market accounts further down the line to encourage them to keep more of their cash in X.
In the X blog post published today, the company claims it will launch peer-to-peer payments this year to unlock “more user utility and new opportunities for commerce,” suggesting a tie-in with other X products such as creator revenue sharing and online shopping. The company also promised continued investment in creators, content partnerships, original content, full-funnel advertising and brand safety.
The latter was of particular concern to X advertisers, who found that despite X’s measures, their ads were placed next to toxic content or hate speech, causing many to opt out. Musk, speaking at an event in November, told runaway advertisers to “go” themselves, and X has turned to small to mid-sized advertisers to fill the gap. However, the company is trying to court advertisers, as per a recent post vertical video brand safety initiatives revealed earlier this week.
X’s announcement today also suggested that artificial intelligence would be part of the platform’s future, following the launch of Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, the powerful Grok chatbot. While the post didn’t include specifics, it did say that AI will be used to “increasingly enhance X user experiences and advertising, including in areas such as improving search, improving ads and “feeding a new level of customer understanding,” which appears to be a vague reference to AI-powered advertising tools.
xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, will power additional consumer-facing features such as today’s “See Similar Posts,” as well as an upcoming “See Dissimilar Posts” feature that will encourage people to “challenge prospects them,” the post explains. (This promise, however, could be difficult to realize if X continues to suspend journalists from his platform.)
The company also offered an update on its progress over the past year, which included the launch of long-form video, audio and video calling, X Hiring, the expansion of Communities, Grok, creator tools, and more. It said users have since watched “130-year-old” videos of 30 minutes or more and participated in calls averaging 10 minutes long. In addition, 80,000+ creators received payments through X’s revenue sharing program in less than a year, but X did not provide details.
