Elon Musk's move to turn X into an “everything app” like China's WeChat — the app that combines chat, dating, payments, and social media — may already be doomed.
While Musk sees this as a path to profitability, a think-piece up on Business Insider today suggests he might be missing a major plot point: The U.S. isn't China.
🏁 WeChat's Headstart
A big challenge for Musk is that WeChat was originally designed as an all-in-one app from its inception, giving it a headstart and contributing to its success and its now more than 1.3 billion monthly active users. Far ahead of Twitter's 368 million.
The piece notes that a big part of WeChat's success is also because of China's strict tech censorship, which bans major Western competitors like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
But when Musk looks at these user numbers and simply assumes that adding functions to X will make it the WeChat of the West, he's missing the point. WeChat is a social ecosystem in itself that's locked its users in from the get-go, something that Facebook and the entity formerly known as Twitter will likely never be able to achieve.
That's not to say that Musk can't find a way to make these features appealing enough to the Western world to lock more consumers into a potential X ecosystem. But it's worth noting that when Tencent introduced WeChat over a decade ago, the digital space in China was still growing, and lacked a major power player.
Musk, however, is attempting to carve out a space in a crowded tech market… Right now, we have yet to see or hear enough about X to know for sure if he even stands a chance of winning. But Musk may be too late to the game for the odds to be in his favor.
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