Twitter has filed documents with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to initiate payment activity. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and head of Twitter, explained that the social media platform could offer “an extremely compelling money market account” in addition to “debit cards, checks and others“.
Elon Musk shares his ideas for Twitter’s payment system
Twitter has filed registration documents with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to allow it to process payments, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, noting that it has seen the filing.
During an audio podcast on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday, the Tesla CEO and new Twitter boss provided a comprehensive overview of Twitter’s business. During the stream, he described how the social media company plans to “enable monetization for creators.”
Elon Musk went on to share his thoughts on how verified users who pay an $8 monthly subscription to Twitter will be “authenticated by the payment system“, specifying :
Now we can say, for example, ok, you have a balance in your account, do you want to send money to someone else in Twitter? …And maybe we pre-fill their account with it and say, okay, we’ll give you 10 bucks, and you can send it anywhere in Twitter.
Users with authenticated bank accounts linked to their Twitter accounts will be able to “get out of the system” and transfer their Twitter balance off the platform, Musk explained, adding:
The next step would be to offer an extremely attractive money market account to earn an extremely high return on your balance.
Twitter could then add “debit cards, checks and more“, noted the boss of Tesla and Spacex. Running a payments business would make Twitter a competitor to Paypal, a company Musk helped found.
Musk has previously said he wants to build X, the app of everything, and Twitter will likely speed up building X by three to five years.