There’s been some speculation he is trying to build an Everything app a-la WeChat in China. Aside from the fact that the everything app concept has never really worked outside China, and certainly won’t fly with the EU — he probably would have been better starting it from zero. I’m pretty sure if he could have got out of the Twitter acquisition he would have.
I’ve noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have those kinds of ambitions but nobody is hiring at the scale of WeChat (well, Tencent Holding). You’re talking about a platform/ecosystem that has tens of thousands of developers actively working on it. Twitter is in the opposite position having been cut down to the bone. Not going to happen.
Tecent already had a diversified Internet business before they launched WeChat. Musk needs a whole portofolio of companies to enable his mega-app vision, and that is not considering all the anti-competition lawsuits coming his way should he acquire those companies and refer to them exclusively within the X app.
FB/Meta and Google likely had similar ambitions and they haven't succeeded in building one despite being in a far better position to do so. Google Maps is probably the closest thing we can get to a mega-app in the Western world, for now.
Smartphones saw rapid growth in China at the same time as mega-apps formed. The tech giants that built these mega-apps also acquired many consumer services that used to be independent companies and integrated them into the mega-app over time. Then out of the interest to compete with each other, these tech giants kept making their own mega-app larger in order to capture more user activity within their ecosystem of services. The emergence of mega-apps in China was not the consumer's choice.
We already have "everything apps" - it's called a browser. I would indeed be missing that if we didn't already have it.
I can also imagine how people might find it convenient to have essentially browser, messaging and payment combined into a single thing (essentially WeChat) they can use instead of a variety of separate apps/accounts.
But I'm also sceptical anyone can make that happen in democratic capitalist countries without insane amounts of investment.
But outside web-browsers, I'm not sure it is anything anyone wants - like you imply, in China it's probably handy, because it is a reliable route into all the services that are blessed by the CCP, which means you avoid running into firewalls & thought police.
I'd say that Elon's claims about the future are highly speculative as well. After all, he's the same guy who claimed there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the street by the end of 2020. I think it's more useful to look at them as PR statements and ask what effect they were intended to have.
So far Elon's actions have consisted entirely of destroying and zero building. He promised a money market feature (which is a prominent part of Chinese mega-apps e.g. Alipay and WeChat), but there have been no concrete plans or any regulatory talk related to it.
If Elon Musk is still serious about building a mega-app then he needs to rapidly acquire/launch a lot more companies in consumer spending sectors e.g. entertainment, hotels, delivery, restaurant reviews, etc. But linking to those services within the mega-app would run into trouble with anticompetitive lawsuits pretty much everywhere.
There is a big hill for Elon to climb yet he's only focused on kicking rocks barefoot at the bottom of that hill.
That's what amazes me. The path to attempt that was pretty straightforward. Get in control, make some small changes to accommodate as many people as possible, reassure advertisers, add some surprising features that start to extend Twitter and see how people take to them. Make it more about creating and enjoying rather than just outright fighting. No one wants their polarised-arguing app to also be their banking and housing and everything app!
