Why Is Billionaire Elon Musk Suddenly Thinking About Creating The Everything App And What Does It Mean?

This question arose after the Tesla CEO changed his mind about his earlier decision not to buy Twitter.

Musk is now ready to move forward with his original plan to buy the social media company for $44 billion, and late last Tuesday he tweeted, "The Twitter purchase is an acceleration to build the X (X) everything."

The concept of do everything, often referred to as a "super app" is very popular in Asia, and tech companies around the world have tried to replicate it.

What is SUPER?

The super-app, or what Musk refers to as the "app of everything" has been described as the Swiss Army Knife - a tool he uses that contains several tools - for mobile applications, offering a range of services to users such as messaging, social networking, payments and e-commerce.

These massive apps are widely used in Asia because the mobile phone is the main form of internet access for many people in the region, Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University and co-host of the tech podcast Pivot, wrote last year.

Some examples of super apps

Chinese super app WeChat has more than 1 billion monthly users, according to the latest estimates, and is ubiquitous in daily life in China.

With it, users can call a car or taxi, send money to friends and family, or make payments in stores.

In 2018, some Chinese cities began testing WeChat for an electronic identification system linked to user accounts, according to the South China Morning Post.

Grab, a leading app across Southeast Asia, offers food delivery, passenger transportation, on-demand parcel delivery, and financial and investment services.

The Chinese superhero WeChat has more than one billion monthly users (Reuters)

Why does Musk want to create a super app?

During a question-and-answer session with Twitter employees last June, Musk noted that there is no equivalent to a super app like WeChat outside of Asia.

"You mainly live on WeChat in China," he said, adding that he saw an opportunity to create such an app.

Adding more tools and services to Twitter can help Musk reach the company's growth goals.

During a question-and-answer session with staff, he said he wanted Twitter to grow from 237 million users to "at least a billion".

Musk and members of his inner circle have written several times about the idea of ​​adding digital payments to Twitter, according to letters released in the discovery phase of the litigation between Musk and the social media company.

Have other US tech companies tried the idea?

Yes, Snapchat previously offered an online payment service, but it ended the feature in 2018. It also introduced mobile games on its platform, and recently ended that project as part of its cost-cutting plans.

Meta's Facebook and Instagram have also tried to expand beyond social networking and messaging into e-commerce.