Elon Musk’s “everything app” vision is one step closer to reality, though not yet for everyone.
X Money, the payments/financial services app linked to the trillionaire’s social media platform, went live Monday (July 27), but only for premium subscribers at the moment.
The new offering includes peer-to-peer payments and money transfers from within X, as well as a deposit account, and the X card, physical Visa debit card. The company has said the platform offers users the ability to “pay anyone, any way,” such as paying rent, sending a wire, mailing a check or paying friends.
X Money is not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), though deposits are held at Cross River Bank, an FDIC-backed lender.
Creating an “everything app” has been one of Musk’s long-held goals. Years before Twitter—later renamed X—existed, Musk launched a payments company known as “X.com“ that eventually became PayPal.
The road to bringing X Money to life has been a long one. Musk said in 2023 that he expected X to have a financial services function by 2024.
The launch of X Money comes as consumers increasingly embrace digital banking methods, as PYMNTS Intelligence research has shown. Digital banks are now the main primary financial institution for 13.8% of U.S. consumers, just ahead of local banks and not far behind regional banks and credit unions, the research found.
“National banks still dominate, but fewer than half of consumers say a national bank is their main provider,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year. “The rise of digital banks is not evenly distributed across the population. It is driven by younger adults, lower-income households and people without college degrees who appear to value convenience and mobile-first access over branch networks.”
Millennials make up the core of this group, with more than half of digital bank users coming from that age cohort, or from Generation Z (which itself makes up the largest group of X users).
On the opposite end of the generational spectrum, baby boomers and seniors account for just 17% of digital bank users, well below their share of the wider banking population.
“Income and education patterns reinforce that divide,” PYMNTS added. “More than half of digital bank users earn less than $50,000 a year, compared with about three in 10 consumers across all financial institutions. Consumers without college degrees account for 86% of digital bank users. That gap persists even when younger age groups are removed from the analysis.”
