Elon Musk gives X employees one year to replace your bank
www.theverge.com
Musk wants your “entire financial life” on his platform.

“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

Well that sounds terrifying!

  • Pumpkin EscobarEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    Yeah, I have trouble imagining this working in the US, even if Musk hadn’t spent a year flushing his cash and credibility down the drain.

    • DojanEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      I don’t see it working in Sweden either.

      1. We have apps for identifying ourselves digitally, most popular being BankID, but there are alternatives like Freja E-ID and various others.
      2. We have apps for easy money transfers, Swish being the most prominent, and it can be used to pay in stores and such as well.
      3. We have apps that combine economy management and shopping, I’ve no idea how popular they are, but Klarna comes to mind.

      Amazon launched here a couple of years ago, and I think they’ve clawed out a niche in the market shockingly, but they’re not the “go to marketplace” for everything. If I want to buy electronics there’s like at least half a dozen online (that often have physical locations) stores I’d go to first. Same thing for larger appliances, clothes, make-up/beauty/skin-hair-care, shoes, sporting goods, furniture. Amazon is mostly for like weird niche stuff, like it’s the only place I could find a detergent that’s designed for robot mops that doesn’t contain tea-tree oil. Amazon is also a decent place to find mass-produced cheap garbage tat, like LED string lights and what have you.

      They also make use of the same delivery services that all other stores do, so there’s no point in using them if you want speedy deliveries. I also don’t feel safe as a buyer when using Amazon because while I’m sure they have to be compliant with Swedish consumer laws, I’m also positive they’ll make the experience as tricky to navigate as possible. If I buy a motherboard from say Inet, and it breaks, I can just send an email to Jonas at Inet and they’ll sort it out. Nothing will be that straight-forward with Amazon.

      Anyway, the point of that massive segue is; if a MASSIVE specialised company like Amazon has failed to fully establish themselves in their own niche here in Sweden, how on earth would a broken microblogging platform manage to “out-compete” other, trusted, and established services?

      Musk is aiming to use twitter for a niche that doesn’t exist. Literally the only demand for this dream platform of his, is himself.

      • @Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        Speaking of buying weird niche items from Amazon: I’ve ordered spare parts and other weird and obscure electronics from Amazon so many times that now they think I’m a company and that I should have a company account.

        How did this happen? If I want to buy normal stuff, I’ll walk to a normal store and buy it there. If I need something a bit more special, I’ll probably find it somewhere within a 2000 km radius. If nobody sells what I need, I’ll try Amazon. That’s why my shopping history looks like I’m running some special company.