Elon Musk’s ‘X Money’ Partners With Visa For Payments—Here’s What To Know About Venmo Rival

 

Elon Musk's X is partnering with Visa on its Venmo rival.

Elon Musk’s social media company X announced Tuesday it secured Visa as its partner for its upcoming digital payments service “X Money,” making the most tangible step yet in creating an “everything app,” though Musk’s company will enter a crowded field including PayPal’s Venmo.

Key Facts

Payments giant Visa will be X Money’s “first partner” for the service debuting later this year, according to X CEO Linda Yaccarino, who added X Money will connect to Visa debit cards and offer an “instant” bank account transfer option.

In a follow-up post on the platform, Visa said it will enable American users of the forthcoming service to “fund and transfer money in real-time with their debit card.”

Yaccarino said the Visa partnership is the “first of many big announcements about X Money this year” for the company’s payments service joining a space already dominated by three names: Venmo, Block’s Cash App and Zelle, which is jointly owned by seven U.S. banks including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

Yaccarino did not share insight on what will differentiate X Money from established peer-to-peer payments competitors other than the service being native to a non-financial app, though CNBC reported X Money will allow creators on the site to get paid for their monetized content and store those funds directly on X rather than via a bank, an anonymous source told the publication.

And the Visa deal is “another milestone for the Everything App,” remarked Yaccarino, nodding to the richest man in the world Musk’s ambitions to transform X into an all-encompassing service since buying the company then known as Twitter in 2022.

Crucial Quote

X can “become the biggest financial institution in the world,” Musk yearned in a March 2023 interview, laying out a vision for what’s now X Money including “one click” transactions and interest-earning accounts.

Key Background

It was unclear at the time what Musk’s yardstick was for measuring the world’s largest financial institution, but X certainly still has a long road ahead to even break through as the largest peer-to-peer payment processor. Market research firm eMarketer estimates Zelle will have 97 million American users in 2025, followed by Venmo’s 76 million and Cash App’s 55 million. Only about 55 million Americans use X, according to Edison Research, meaning even if a major chunk of those users flock to X Money, it’s likely the service’s U.S. market penetration will still be far behind its competitors. Still, the upcoming launch of X Money is an example of Musk’s push to keep users on X beyond the traditional social media site, with his startup xAI’s Grok generative AI platform also on the platform.

What We Don’t Know

If X Money will charge instant transfer fees. Both Cash App and Venmo take a cut of instant transfers to financial institutions, while Zelle, which operates directly through bank accounts, does not.

Tangent

Musk actually got his big break in the digital payments space, as the X.com digital bank startup he cofounded was a predecessor to PayPal, making Musk one of the core members of the “PayPal mafia” including billionaire Peter Thiel and President Donald Trump’s “AI & Crypto czar” David Sacks. And Cash App parent Block is run by Jack Dorsey, the billionaire Twitter cofounder.