Elon Musk shared further details of his plans for how crypto could be used on Twitter in a leaked Q&A session with employees of the social media company.
Per a transcript of the meeting released by Vox, the billionaire Tesla CEO expounded on how payments, including crypto, are a “critical area” for Twitter, and highlighted the ongoing issue of crypto scams on the social media platform.
“Money is fundamentally digital at this point,” Musk said. He added that, “it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that its easy to send money back and forth,” noting that this would include, “currency as well as crypto.”
Stating that his goal is “to maximize the usefulness of the service,” Musk said that, “if one can use it to make convenient payments, that‘s an increase in usefulness.” He added that, news, entertainment and payments are “three critical areas” for Twitter, in order to make the service “so compelling that you can’t live without it and that everyone wants to use it.”
Musk's suggestion that Twitter integrate payments mirrors his earlier argument that the platform should become a WeChat-style “super app”; the Chinese social media platform brings together multiple services including ride hailing, food delivery and payments under one umbrella.
Musk takes aim at Twitter crypto scamsIn the Q&A, Musk also addressed an ongoing pet peeve: the prevalence of bots and crypto scams on Twitter. “There‘s quite a lot of crypto scams on Twitter,” he said, conceding that, “It’s gotten better, but theres still a fair bit of that.”
He added that, “There are also people where they‘re not necessarily bots, but they might be operating. You know, one person’s operating hundreds of accounts and trying to make them look like individuals, but theyre not.”
“In order for people to have trust in Twitter, I think its extremely important that there be transparency,” Musk said, reiterating his earlier suggestion that the platform's code be made open-source, “so that people can critique it, improve it, identify bugs, potentially, or bias.”
One solution Musk put forward to address the problem of fake accounts on Twitter was verification through payment for its Twitter Blue subscription service By “piggybacking on the payment system,” he suggested, “Twitter would know who you are, at least from a payment standpoint.” Musk has previously suggested—possibly in jest—that Twitter Blue subscriptions could be paid in his favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
Bot activity has become a key factor in Musk's on-again off-again purchase of Twitter. After making his $43 million bid to buy the social media platform in April, the Tesla CEO said that the purchase “cannot move forward” until Twitter provides information on how many fake accounts exist on the platform.
Earlier this month, Twitter reportedly gave Musk access to a “firehose” of data including every tweet posted on the platform, in order to enable him to independently verify levels of bot activity.