Musk’s X wants your cash

Hey all, it’s Kurt Wagner in Denver. Elon Musk wants X to be your new bank, but first…Three things you need to know today:• Anthropic is rel [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey all, it’s Kurt Wagner in Denver. Elon Musk wants X to be your new bank, but first… Three things you need to know today: • Anthropic is releasing a new [AI model to rival OpenAI]( • Amazon is scrapping its [air pillow packaging in North America]( • TikTok accused the US of ignoring a deal that would have [alleviated national security concerns]( Will you bank with X? Elon Musk wants to turn X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, into an “everything app.” Imagine a single app for your private messaging, news consumption, shopping and even banking. In China, WeChat fills that role, and Musk [has spoken publicly]( about replicating that model using X in other countries. Payments are at the center of this everything app idea. If you can’t send or spend money on X, you won’t be able to do everything. In fact, you won’t be able to do a lot of things. Musk knows this, of course, which is why he’s building a payments product inside X. This week, [Bloomberg published an in-depth look]( at the company’s progress on this front. We used public records requests to obtain hundreds of documents about X’s money transmitter license applications in all 50 US states. Those documents offered a glimpse of what is to come: a Venmo-like payments feature that will let users store money on their X accounts for easy purchases and peer-to-peer transfers. Musk has even talked about offering an “extremely high yield” on balances to encourage people to leave money in their X account. X has received payments licenses in 28 states so far, with plans to expand internationally shortly after getting up and running in the US. By the time people eventually start sending money to their friends through X, it will have been a multiyear effort. The reality, though, is that navigating the technical complexity and regulatory red tape is going to be the easy part. The real challenge will be convincing the world that X is now a bank. For much of the past two decades, X has been an app for doom-scrolling the news, watching celebrities create their own PR disasters and dunking on politicians. It has never been a place for shopping or paying your friends. It certainly wasn’t a place you’d store your hard-earned savings. Others have tried turning messaging apps into the “WeChat of the West” for years without luck, including Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has not one but two billion-user messaging services at his disposal in Messenger and WhatsApp. One issue is that many Americans [seem totally fine]( using different, specialized apps for different, specialized needs. Another is that most people are already using an existing competitor — Venmo, Zelle, Cash App and PayPal (which, ironically, Musk co-founded) offer a version of what Musk is building. Luring customers away from those rivals will be tough since banking relationships are so “sticky,” said [Harshita Rawat](bbg://people/profile/18652811), a senior payments analyst with Bernstein. “It is very, very, very hard” to get people to change to a new bank or payments service, she said. Musk has never been one to back away from a challenge, though, and I imagine this will be more of the same. If the everything app is going to work, he will need to change user behavior at a global scale. The difficult part is about to begin.—[Kurt Wagner](mailto:kwagner71@bloomberg.net) (The Tech Daily published June 20 was corrected to show that Micron Technology Inc. reached a preliminary agreement for Chip Act funds earlier this year.) The big story Car dealers across North America could be out of action for several days after a crippling cyberattack on software provider CDK Global. More than 15,000 dealers rely on the software to run their stores, and since early Wednesday morning, [they have been unable to complete transactions](, access customer records, schedule appointments and handle car-repair orders. 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