For once, Elon Musk is not responsible for his company’s difficulties.
Since he bought Twitter, Elon Musk has not been slow to criticize the decisions of the former management, whether in terms of content policies, his vision of the freedom of expression, or even financial decisions. He undertook to change everything, starting with the name of the company, but also, ultimately, its very principle, since from a social network, he would like to make X.com an all-purpose app so that users do not need to look on other sites. Among his projects, making X.com a money transfer platform was obviously one of the main objectives.
But he may have to reconsider his plans. Indeed, a Saudi family, whose loved ones were imprisoned by the regime and who are currently suing X.com, are making it their duty to prevent this from happening. And the recent conviction of two ex-Twitter employees for espionage is necessarily a weighty argument.
Make X.com an “everything app”
Barely two weeks after taking control of Twitter, and while the company’s first employees were already packing up, Elon Musk presented his plan to save the company: include almost all economic activities in the list of services of the platform. The objective was therefore to offer users the possibility of buying their train tickets or their clothes directly on X.com, of exchanging cryptos there, or even, therefore, of transferring money there. The project is even quite advanced, since 8 American states have already granted banking licenses to the company.
The concept of the everything app is unsurprisingly the wet dream of many tech billionaires, generally not fond of competition, but the only real example in this area is the Chinese platform WeChat, very advanced in terms of services offered, and surveillance on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
Would you trust your money to X.com?
And precisely, on this last point, X.com is far from being free from all reproaches. The network indeed has a recent but fairly extensive history of compromise with more or less authoritarian regimes. Its links with Saudi Arabia are also clearly established, the country’s investment fund having participated in the improbable takeover operation. The same Saudi Arabia on whose behalf two former Twitter employees spied at the end of 2022. They were notably accused of lifting the anonymization of certain accounts of political dissidents in the country, who were then arrested, like Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan.
His family is currently suing X.com for precisely these reasons. In an open letter, among other arguments, the family’s lawyers called on US regulators not to grant more banking licenses to the company, and even asked those who had done so to reverse their decision. Obviously, citing a case of espionage established by American justice is an argument that is likely to be successful.
Source : ArsTechnica, The Guardian
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