Payments Dive
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has bet $44 billion — equal to about a quarter of his net worth — that he can make Twitter pay as a payments player.
Musk has told investors he can quintuple the social media platform’s revenue to $26.4 billion in six years, and a key part of that strategy is building a payments business that contributes $1.3 billion by then, according to a report from The New York Times.
Musk, who pursued the purchase for months before acquiring it on Oct. 27, also underscored the payments tack when he spoke with Twitter employees in June, saying he wanted to revamp Twitter to look more like WeChat, according to a report by The Verge. WeChat is the Chinese social media outlet that has a super app side, letting its users make payments and use other financial tools.
Musk is no stranger to the payments business. He was co-founder of a firm called X.com in 1999 that merged with another business to become PayPal. He has also taken a keen interest in 21st-century payments in the form of cryptocurrencies, doggedly backing a joke crypto called Dogecoin.
And of course, his other entrepreneurial moon-shots, namely car-maker Tesla and the aerospace company SpaceX, have made him the richest man in the world. They’ve also given him plenty of capital to invest in other enterprises.