By
Svetlana Soroka
April 18th, 2024
There is no limit to what Twitter can become eventually as Elon Musk has reiterated his agenda to explore every avenue to make the platform the best place for free speech.
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk came with so much dissension, especially among critics but for Ark Invest’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, Cathie Wood, the opposite is the case.
As a lifelong bull of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), Wood believes Elon Musk could achieve more significant milestones with the social media firm while at the helm of its affairs. Specifically, Wood believes Musk could turn the social media app into a ‘Super App’ in a bid to model it after China’s popular messaging application WeChat.
Super Apps serves multiple functions which include but are not limited to messaging apps, travel, and payments. While Twitter has notably maintained its status as one of the world’s most widely used social media platforms with over 400 million monthly active users. With Elon Musk piloting the affairs of the platform, a pivot into a Super App business is bound to greatly enhance the platform’s value addition, leveraging the already robust adoption that it currently commands.
According to a CNBC report, Elon Musk has already given the hint to spin the social media platform into a Super App. Before the deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion was closed late last month, Musk tweeted that the acquisition of the platform remains an “accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
“Remember [Musk] started in the payments industry … he sold his company to PayPal,” Wood said. “He and [Twitter co-founder] Jack Dorsey working together, I think, could turn this into a super app.”
Musk has already been making significant restructuring to the Twitter platform besides firing the C-Suite executives. He has decided to peg the subscription fee for Twitter Blue to $8, with everyone who makes the payment gaining the much coveted Blue checkmark for verification. While many have protested on the platform, Musk seems to have made up his mind.
Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood Sees Twitter Becoming a Digital Wallet
As part of her projections for Twitter, Cathie Wood believes Musk could also draw on his experience in the payments industry to create a digital wallet out of the social media platform just as we have in the case of Cash App, a dominant payment app created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
“You do all your shopping there, you get your loans there – it’s your bank branch in a pocket,” she added. “I think they can get this done.”
There is no limit to what Twitter can become eventually as Elon Musk has reiterated his agenda to explore every avenue to make the platform the best place for free speech. One thing he is likely to do differently as noted by Cathie Wood is to publish the codes and make them open source, and unlike the previous owners, the algorithms for content moderation can easily be viewed and scrutinized by anyone interested.
These moves, she acknowledges will make it difficult for Musk to allow hate speech to proliferate as many people feared.