Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
After three decades of innovating the worlds of space travel and electric cars (and decidedly not innovating the world of making tunnels) Elon Musk has decided his next step is to build “X, the everything app.” The platform formerly known as Twitter will ostensibly become a one-stop shop for all that people do on their phones: banking, watching videos, messaging, calling, gaming, and, of course, shitposting.
Musk may be unique, but his ambitions are not. There are also plenty of platforms trying to do the same thing: create a digital ecosystem in which you can live your entire life. In fact, back in the summer of 2022, he even noted that his inspiration for X is WeChat, the Chinese everything app run by Tencent.
However, his ambitions to create a catch-all platform for masses may be misguided at best—and downright nefarious at worst. “It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what WeChat is if you think you could build such a thing for a Western audience,” Graham Webster, editor of Stanford University’s DigiChina project, told The Daily Beast.