As Elon Musk announced that he would change the Twitter company name and logo to “X” and aim for the so-called “superapp,” observers say that he will try to take a similar path to KakaoTalk or WeChat in the future.
The New York Times reported on the 27th (local time) that there were many attempts by U.S. companies to copy Asian “superapp” such as Korea’s KakaoTalk, Japan’s Line, and China’s WeChat, but they did not go their way.
Kakao Talk has expanded its business in various ways, including remittance and taxi calls, and WeChat is also considered an essential app for daily life in China as it is in charge of various functions such as payment and food ordering as well as social media functions.
The NYT called Musk’s attempt “Don Quixote” and said he was attracted to the idea of becoming an app for everything at least since last year.
Musk said ahead of the Twitter acquisition deal, “We will speed up creating X, the app for everything (with this acquisition),” and in a recent podcast interview, X said it could be half of the global financial system.
Musk also said in a post on the 24th, “In the next few months, we will add comprehensive communication and the ability to handle users’ finance as a whole,” adding, “The name Twitter is not valid in that context, so we have to say goodbye to the (login) bird.”
The NYT said Musk rarely spoke publicly about X’s goal or function, but explained that he submitted documents to the U.S. Treasury Department-related department in November last year to become a payment processing company and employees worked to build a payment service.
However, in the U.S., Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, who operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, came up with a plan to make WhatsApp a platform with various personal services in 2019, but it was not successful.
In addition, Dara Kosrowshahi, CEO of car-sharing company Uber, and Evan Spiegel, CEO of social media company Snap, made similar attempts, but their performance was insufficient.
This is due to cultural differences between Asia and the United States, as well as the relatively strong anti-trust regulations in the United States and the development of existing financial industries using credit cards, the NYT said.
Analysts say that as U.S. users are familiar with individual service apps, they do not want to handle all their tasks in one app, and that the success of WeChat and others was also supported by the Chinese government.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) also predicted that the WeChat-style business model would not be easy in the U.S. for similar reasons.
Meanwhile, Twitter has completely replaced the symbol logo with the alphabet “X” marked in white on a black background instead of the existing bluebird on the 24th.
According to Fox Business, Musk also said in a post that he plans to change the color of the platform to “dark mode” and that “(such a change) is better in every way.”
