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Musk uses Twitter to hint at Chinese WeChat-style “everything app”

Updated on: 10 October 2022

Damien Black
Senior Journalist

Tesla billionaire and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk appears to be up to his usual Twitter tricks again, using the platform he almost backed out of buying to proclaim App X – which will apparently be for… well, everything.

“Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” Musk mysteriously posted on the platform – which he finally decided last week was worth paying $44 billion to acquire after a protracted and highly publicized legal spat.

And then came the inevitable questions. What, exactly, does “everything” define when talking about an app?

The concept, reported by Reuters as being hugely popular in Asia, is essentially the Holy Grail of the mobile app world – which some say Chinese tech giant Tencent has already sought and found in the form of WeChat.

Initially launched in 2011 as a straightforward messaging platform, WeChat evolved to become the kind of “everything” experience Musk is presumably hoping to emulate: nowadays, the so-called super app is used by an estimated billion people for anything from hailing a cab ride to sending money to friends or shopkeepers at point of purchase.

Given that Musk would like to see his shiny new toy being played with by a similar number of enthusiastic cyber-children – back in June he told Twitter staff he wanted its user base to grow fourfold under his stewardship from its current paltry total of 237 million – perhaps it’s no surprise he is openly mulling the ‘MuskChat’ project.

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Other Twitter users were a little more prosaic about the billionaire's latest brainwave, however.

“Elmo, bro, get over yourself,” opined one enthusiastic user. “[Buying Twitter is] also an accelerant to stop the court orders from making your text messages public,” theorized another. “X-witter,” complete with accompanying draft logo mockup, was the laconic but expressive contribution from a third tweeter.

Nobody knows whether “X-witter” will become a thing of reality, but one thing appears certain – the controversial tech magnate still has eyes on his every tweet.