Despite the optimism from Elon Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino, who are eager to experiment and sound the trumpets for future prospects of the app and its mission to be "the best, most useful platform" for consumers everywhere, specifics of Musk's "everything app" vision remain fairly vague as to how they'll exactly appeal to more users.

Though we are getting more hints along the way, because Musk and Yaccarino provide additional notes and pointers in their various representations, in different capacities.

This week, Yaccarino meets with bankers to discuss X's growth strategy, in order to reassure them of its plan to get the business back to profit. Yaccarino recently noted that X will likely return to profit early next year, though with X's advertiser numbers still significantly down on the pre-Elon era, it remains to be seen whether that's actually a viable, realistic target.

And then there is the matter of convincing business partners that X will indeed be in a position to put its ambitious growth plan for the app into effect.

commerce will play a big role here, and payments and in-stream transactions. Already X is showing interest in this area, taking the right steps, such as payment licenses applications in the United States, to further fuel its much-needed shop push to the next level.

And that could start with sales in DMs, new reports say.

According to The Information:

""X managers are considering ways of using direct messages on the platform to offer one-click checkout to X users, according to three people familiar with the situation. Staffers have met with e-commerce software firms to canvas possible software tools for offering such a product, the people said."

That also aligns with X's push for subscription, because aside from creating that extra revenue stream, and-at-least-theoretically difference between actual human accounts and bots, it would also mean more people are connecting a payment option to their X account, which may make it easier to get them spending in-stream.

And according to earlier notes, Elon actually intends to take this much further by allowing full banking tools within the X platform, including finance services, loans, etc. However, the starting point would be shopping and easing streamlined purchases inside the app.

That's also an element that's been factored into X's new content deal with Paris Hilton, its first direct celebrity partnership under Musk, which includes specific note of "live-shopping broadcasts" within the deal.

X does not currently provide any live-stream shopping feature, but apparently that is on the cards, as all building blocks are currently being put in place to facilitate live interaction streams where users can buy products directly in the app.
Live shopping has been a huge growth factor for Asian social media applications. After being driven by the likes of Douyin-which is TikTok in China, Kuaishou, and others-the live-commerce revolution has grown into an industry that stands at $500 billion on its own.

That, combined with the advent of eCommerce due to COVID-19 has caused many Western apps to try and replicate the same. However, so far, the user acceptance has been lukewarm, and all the platforms have been diverting all their focus away from the live shopping elements; as they are now attempting to allocate more resources onto more proven growth aspects.

Could X get this right, and could that then become a key trigger for its broader shift into transactional commerce, and drive users to buy in-stream?

It's a big ask, especially with X's much smaller development team. That is apparently one of its main areas of focus, however, as the X team looks to shift perceptions of the app, and get users spending and sending money as a launchpad for its bigger transition.

Though again, it remains vague.

While Musk's "everything app" plan dates back to an idea he is reported to have conceptualized in early 2000's, at the start of PayPal, of which he was part of the core group, long before that, Musk maintained that PayPal only represents "a halfway version" of what its full potential can be, where a much more expansive payments and banking-enabled app can accommodate virtually every transaction, quickly, affordably and with no fuss.

The "Western WeChat" has long been touted as an example of what's possible, though more accurately is a reference to the ubiquity of WeChat in China, this having become a staple within modern Chinese society, where people use their WeChat account to buy groceries, buy train tickets, pay bills, book appointments. In other words, everything-from transactional conversations to accessing your digital identity-complete with information regarding your bank account-can be done via the WeChat app by scanning a bar code.

Several social companies, such as those outside of Asia, have tried and failed to launch the same. Examples include Meta, TikTok, and YouTube among a number of apps that tried to go into payments but faced regulatory hurdles, consumer reluctance, and general disinterest in those services.

The bottom line is that western users are less trusting of corporations in this sense, partly because WeChat, like all Chinese businesses, is much more heavily regulated by government, thus imbuing much more trust in such services and partly due to past abuses of consumer data by social media companies, or past scams that have caught many people out within social apps.

Indeed, the FTC reported that scam activity on social media increased sharply in 2021, accounting for 95k victims, having cost them a cumulative $770 million.

That makes consumers less likely to put their trust in social platforms and instead return to dedicated, trusted shopping platforms instead, including Amazon, eBay, etc. Facebook was able to capture a bit of the related market through Marketplace, but even that has been fraught with concerns, and it limits take-up.

It is hard to see, then, how, in this scenario, X expects to be able to convince users to trust it with their money. And that's if X Corp is able to secure the necessary approvals to facilitate such in the first place.

It remains unclear, but X is slowly revealing more of its plans on global takeovers and the rate of innovation at the app is "exhilarating to the point of intoxicating" according to Yaccarino's latest bombastic descriptions.

We, on the user's end, are not seeing that as yet. But maybe, if it can get all the regulatory stamps of approval, and progress its shopping developments, that could become a thing.

It's going to take a lot of development, and time, which X may not be able to weather not without taking significant losses in the near term.

Worry is that Elon's ambition is larger than his runway, but then again the same could have been said of some of his other endeavors.