Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Technology@beehaw.org – 153 points –
Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank
theverge.com
69

That sound you just heard, was the rustle as hundreds of financial regulators around the world leant forward just a little.

I regret I have but one upvote to give. Well done!

It's all about PayPal, isn't it?

Holy fucking shit.

PayPal is Musk's Obama burn.

PayPal shitcanned him because he's a fucking idiot so he takes that money, gets SpaceX going and memes Tesla to success by sheer accident. At the point everyone's thinking he's "Rill Loaf Toony Sturk" he's STILL fucking boiling that PayPal canned him because he's actually terrible at everything. He then proceeds to start sniffing his own farts, building rescue submarines that would never work, calling people "pedo guys", impregnating every woman that will take the payoff to have his moron seed implanted in them, moving to Texas and wearing a fucking cowboy hat to show how much of a REEL MAYUN he is (despite the fact that fucking nobody wears a cowboy hat in this state outside of actual cowboys and people that want to announce that they're fucking idiots to everyone).

He renames Twitter to X so trigger his nostalgia balls and then a few months later announces he's going to replace banks with X. Which would also, theoretically, replace PayPal.

He really is nothing more than a little bitch that happens to have money.

Ha, I didn't even think of the PayPal connection, but now that you mention it, he's exactly the sort of petty manchild that that sounds plausible. He might figure that it'd be a nice double whammy: he can finally get even with those fucks at PayPal who didn't see how brilliant he is, and it'd help keep Twitter afloat so he can feel like he's not a complete failure.

impregnating every woman

Inseminating; the majority of Musk's spawn was conceived with IVF. Musk does not fuck

Musk does not fuck

There's a sentence I did not expect to read today, but kinda did expect to read someday.

You didn't think of the PayPal connection? You didn't read the article at all either I guess?

I absolutely did not read it, the headline tells me enough and I can think of several more pleasurable activities than reading an article about Musk, such as shoving red hot needles under my fingernails

"I didn't bother reading the thing or learning the basics, but I'm going to comment anyway and pretend I didn't want to do it"

At least I'm not a judgemental twat to random people on the internet , so I guess I have that going for me. Just because I didn't think to connect Musk's PayPal history with this move doesn't mean I don't know about it, you know?

Why is it always the kbin users, I swear

I really don't think it's much to ask people to read the damn article before they start blathering their opinions on it. And not doubling down on being intentionally ignorant.

If we spent our lives reading every musk article shoved into our feeds we'd all starve from having no time to eat

2 more...
2 more...
2 more...

Really? Lol, no.

I like my money in a bank. Somewhere that has those "pesky" regulations that keep me from getting (too) screwed over.

If this ever comes out and you actually put your money in it, you deserve whatever fuckery happens to it. I'm sorry, but I'm completely out of empathy for Musk's fans.

In my country, your birth certificate has both your deadname and your new name on it if you changed your name. When I signed up for PayPal, I had already transitioned, so I put in my current, legal name. PayPal asked for proof that I am who I claim to be, to prevent fraud. Fair enough, I gave them my birth certificate. They looked at it, and then changed the name on my account to my deadname, which was no longer my legal name. When I told them to change it back, they said I'd have to submit a change of name form.

I knew Musk was transphobic sooner than most of the public did after that experience.

Don't think this is necessarily connected to Musk though. Like, I had similar experiences with most institutions and some banks still fuck up my name. Musk probably has zero say in this. But yeah, I avoided for a long time to change my name on PayPal for this exact same reason. When I did update my name this year it did work out great however. PayPal didn't ask me for any proof and it was a smooth experience.

Musk faces major challenges to get there, though. Convincing people why they need such a platform is one. Getting them to trust X with their entire financial life is another.

It's less about trusting X but trusting Musk. Trying to make an "everything app" with him in charge just feels dystopian.

Trying to make an “everything app” with him in charge just feels dystopian.

Trying to make an “everything app” at all, whoever is in charge, is dystopian. Given the conspiracy theorists' general alarm at new world order, one world government type scenarios it's a wonder he isn't pilloried for this by the same mad bastards who advocate for him instead. Maybe he is and I just haven't kept up

5 more...

Sure, let me give all my money to the broke billionaire with the bad investment history - what could go wrong?!

I just feel like musk wants a western version of wechat for a hybrid user base of hardcore republicans and hardcore libertarians. That seems like such a fundamental oxymoron... but here we are.

And in fact, I hate to say it, but given how good those groups of people are at bending reality and making themselves conform to a warped capitalist standard, it might just work out for a while. But more than likely it'll probably also go the way of "trump bucks" or whatever those psycho-loyalist cryptocoins were called. Basically it'll end up a big old miserable fraud.

The again if it's Elon's coin on the table I'm not so sure I care. He's just ruining spacex, tesla, et. al. Let him bleed money.

What's genuinely sad is that the people who can't bail from twitter quickly will be spitroasted by musk in the process.

What's genuinely sad is that the people who can't bail from twitter quickly will be spitroasted by musk in the process.

It takes two to spitroast.

Even before Musk I wouldn't have trusted Twitter with my finances or even just my credit card.

5 more...

"Unless you give us all your money to put in our new bank, we might be facing insolvency issues."

Hmm, this seems like the sort of addition where it might have been nice to have a bunch of world leading developers and designers hanging around. Seems odd to fire them all if this was the plan.

Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make, but i’m sure it was really a cunning 5d chess move and not evidence that our overlords who are born into wealth are just as dumb as the rest of us.

Oh they're not as dumb as the rest of us, that's the scary thing. They're even dumber.

Sometimes I wonder if he's doing it on purpose. Like, this has to be a joke, right?

The level of absurd stupidity from someone who'd once seemingly tricked us all into thinking he was really smart is just.. baffling.

from someone who'd once seemingly tricked us all into thinking he was really smart

Well, ...

Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make

Hey, playing Elden Ring takes some skill and dedication. Did you see the build he put on Twitter that time? It was hilariously stupid. In fairness, maybe he was playing all night with it just to get past very basic foes.

Oh hell no. I've seen how he manages his money. Like fuck I'm letting him anywhere near mine.

I don't even trust most banks. I like my credit union, thank you very much.

I'm going to let some impulsive rich brat who paid $36B too much for a social media company, only to tank it and transform it into his own personal political misinformation machine to handle all my finances? Riiiiight.

Well he can fuck right off. The moron strikes again with yet another in a long line of “no one asked for this bullshit” features that hopefully completely destroys his $44,000,000,000 toy.

Why would I ever want to bank with Twitter, especially while that mentally unstable idiot owns it?

I'm torn between wanting him to go hard on this so I can watch it burn and being terrified he'll somehow succeed and it will be hard to avoid.

It's already painful to stay out of Facebook's clutches.

It’s already painful to stay out of Facebook’s clutches.

How so? NoScript and a pihole make it pretty darn easy.

Because of the number of groups that literally only communicate via Facebook and Facebook marketplace replacing everything else like it.

In my case, that but WhatsApp. Can't live without it, as much as I'd like.

Don't you feel that WhatsApp is sufficiently insulated from the normal practices of Facebook/Meta/the Zuckerverse though?

Perhaps it's my naivety, but I've never really seen the point of them owning WhatsApp, especially since it integrated e2e encryption and has fought the EU to keep it. From an end-user perspective, it's just a pretty polished, widely used (and thus useful), and decently private/secure messaging application. I could see the appeal of moving to a Signal, Session, etc., except for their relatively low uptake among the general public where I am.

I've just seen the actions Meta's taken, and as such I believe nothing they say. I was on my family's WhatsApp group chat until the buyout.

SMS is fine for most things domestically. Signal's there for international and edge cases. Most of my family are on Signal; there's just not a group there, and I view this as a feature.

Yeah, it's a decent app with less overreach seeping in from Meta compared with Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Still, it makes me uncomfortable that many communities that I value greatly would be out of my reach if it were to stop using it. For now it's not a problem, but I'm hyper-aware of the danger.

this genuinely made getting an apartment such a total nightmare. Every "group" online for finding apartments in my city is Facebook only. Sure, craigslist works but it's filled with out-of-date realty company spam. If you want to avoid facebook the easiest way is just word of mouth but that's difficult for people moving in from out of town. I ended up getting my current place by emailing a guy who I heard about from a friend.

In some places Messenger is the default communications platform, more so than SMS or WhatsApp or iMessage or whathaveyou.

I'm waiting for him to say something about involving crypto and AI

He's never going to get this past the regulators. Financial break points and buffers make sense, every financial crisis and crisis of stability has taught us that. If you continue to build too big to fail systems, it's going to be a complete disaster. Deposit institutions shouldn't be involved in speculative investment banking , which is what high yield usually is. You can't pay high yields if you aren't in turn doing any sort of high yield activity with investor deposits. Or without any sort of prop trading. Which he's sort of suggesting this is going to be. Some of this sounds like it's going to break the Volcker rule.

Not to even mention this might not qualify for FDIC protections.

Good luck to Mr. Musk, the bank ain't gonna give up my money without a fight.

Even if this wasn't Elon Musk, the very idea of your boss having control over your finances sounds dumb as a brick.

[Musk] "And for some reason PayPal, once it became eBay, not only did they not implement the rest of the list, but they actually rolled back a bunch of key features, which is crazy. So PayPal is actually a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago.”

"And for some reason not only they didn't implement a lot of my stupid ideas, but they reverted some of my dumbest takes that still went through. And 23 years later I still didn't learn."

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Elon Musk wants X to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money.

He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024, he told X employees during an all-hands call on Thursday, saying that people will be surprised with “just how powerful it is.”

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge.

The company is currently working on locking down money transmission licenses across the US so that it can offer financial services.

“The X/PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks actually in July of 2000,” Musk said on Thursday’s internal X call.

“And for some reason PayPal, once it became eBay, not only did they not implement the rest of the list, but they actually rolled back a bunch of key features, which is crazy.


Saved 62% of original text. :::