For a moment, let's put aside the fact that Elon Musk is rebranding Twitter, one of the world's most recognizable brands, to X, and by doing so, risking hundreds of millions in legal fees to lose over a billion in brand equity on an investment that has already lost tens of billions in valuation on. Let's put that aside for now.
It's abundantly clear what Elon Musk is trying to do because he's said it ad nauseam: he's trying to create a "super app" that combines social media with payments with shopping with ride sharing with...everything. We get it. It's WeChat for America.
My question for Elon: what problem does a super app actually solve?
To some extent, a super app solves the same problems that the fediverse and ActivityPub are trying to solve: it would break down the individual silos between services that put just a little bit of extra friction in your day. It's annoying that I can be following one of my best friends on Twitter but I still have to do a scavenger hunt to find them on Venmo. It's not perfect.
But is it that bad? Are we all really sitting here just melting in misery because we're sick of finding people's Venmos? And do I really need to be able to instantly send payments to all of my Twitter followers?
Name me one more consumer-facing benefit of the super app. And while you think, I'll tell you about some of the huge downsides and challenges.
First, we've known since the industrial revolution that specialization = good. We know that having one person or one company focus on being great at one things ultimately makes better things. Twitter has only scored a B- in showing it can build a good social network, and I'm not racing to Vegas to bet on it building a better ride sharing service than Uber, a better payments platform than Venmo, or a better shopping experience than Amazon.
Second, Elon Musk has done literally nothing over the last year to make people think his regime is the one we should entrust all of our personal data and digital lives to. You need to have a virtually spotless brand image to even qualify for the super app race. Twitter has the brand image today of a car windshield parked under a pigeon-covered power line. I'm not giving my everything to Twitter.
And lastly, we already have a really dominant super app. It's called iOS. All a super app really is is a more efficient operating system for digital interactions. iOS is by nature a decentralized service; it's main function is launching apps, many of which are built by different developers with different tech stacks and interfaces. But if you ignore that fact for now and just pretend all the apps on your iPhone were made by Apple (and many of your most used ones probably were anyways), then you're there. You're already using a super app every hour of every day, and it's your iPhone's Home Screen.
I get how dominant WeChat is in China. I get that for all intents and purposes, WeChat is The Internet there. But we're not China. And it doesn't really matter why we're not China. I'm sure some sociologist could point to some easy cultural difference that explains why WeChat caught on so fast in China, but really all that's important to know is that something that works in one culture will by no means necessarily work in another, especially when it's not clearly solving a major problem. Amazon and Uber and Venmo and Instagram and Ticketmaster and iMessage are all very established services in America, and getting people to switch from these well-known brands to a new service that does the same things almost as well is just going to be really freaking difficult.
It's a moonshot. Someone was bound to take it, and that means Elon Musk was bound to take it. Maybe I'm wrong and this will all pay off. But I'm not buying X stock anytime soon.
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