Elon Musk's quixotic quest to turn X into an 'everything app'
The idea was akin to that of an "everything app" espoused recently by Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter. But the dream belonged to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In a 2019 blog post, Zuckerberg outlined how he would turn WhatsApp into an app that could be a platform for many «kinds of private services.» In Silicon Valley, the pursuit of an everything app has come up time and again as tech leaders have strained to expand their digital empires.
Zuckerberg tried it. So did Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber. Evan Spiegel, the head of Snap, said he wanted to go for it, too.
Yet those efforts fell short, with the tech executives unable to replicate the magic that has abounded in Asia with «super apps» like China's WeChat, Japan's Line and South Korea's KakaoTalk. U.S. tech giants have instead run into cultural differences, regulatory scrutiny and a splintered financial system that has made the quest to build such apps more difficult.
And now Musk, who this week changed Twitter's name to X, the moniker for his everything app, is chasing the same goal — and is likely to face the same challenges. In the United States, people are «accustomed to single-service apps, which makes moving to a multiservice app a bit disorienting,» said Dan Prud'homme, an assistant professor of business at Florida International University. «To some extent, U.S.
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