Why Musk's 'X' will struggle to become a Chinese-style super-app
Elon Musk is rebranding his Twitter platform as "X" and wants to create a super-app where users will do all their finances as well as their socialising.
His inspiration is China's WeChat, which dominates the Chinese internet with chat, payments, games and a host of other functions in its walled garden.
Musk has hinted that this kind of "everything app" is his goal for the X platform but experts reckon he will struggle.
The app was launched by China's big tech behemoth Tencent in 2011 to replace an earlier desktop chat program called QQ.
It is used by almost everyone in China and weaves together messaging, voice and video calling, social media, mobile payment, games, news, online booking and other services.
It passed the one-billion-account mark in 2018, with most of its users based in mainland China.
No. Twitter, or X, is much smaller and more limited in its functions. China has its own Twitter equivalent, called Sina Weibo.
"Sina Weibo is also one of the largest social networks in China, but it serves a very different function than WeChat," said Kendra Schaefer, head of tech policy research at analysis firm Trivium China.
"It is not as critical to daily life, people don't pay using that platform. They use it primarily just for browsing threads."
Back in the 2000s, before the age of the smartphone, China's internet sector was a place of fevered experimentation with very little regulation.
Kai von Carnap from Merics, a German think-tank specialising in China, said the internet sector "had an absolute Wild West free market economy".
"Absolutely no labour protections or data protections or competition regulations," the analyst said.
Tencent was among those experimenting and succeeding where thousands of others failed.
Crucially Tencent
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