Elon Musk Wants to Turn Twitter Into a "Super App" Modeled After China's WeChat

"Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app," Musk tweeted on Oct. 4 after striking an agreement with Twitter's board to go through with the deal. The world's most well-known super app is perhaps WeChat, operated by Chinese internet giant Tencent. Every day, hundreds of millions of WeChat users send messages, make video calls, share photos and documents, shop, send payments to each other, and even pay utility bills on the app. Musk floated the idea of creating a similar app to WeChat shortly after signing the deal to acquire Twitter. At the All-In Summit 2022 in Miami in May, the Tesla CEO praised WeChat as "Really an excellent app" and "a good model" for Twitter. In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview he wants to shift Facebook users away from public sharing and more toward private conversations-a feature pioneered by WeChat in the early 2010s when it was first launched as a messaging app. In a study on the apps published in April, Insider Intelligence, a market research firm, attributed WeChat's success to two factors: the takeoff of smartphone ownership in China in the early 2010s and a regulatory environment that allows WeChat to integrate thousands of "Mini apps" under its umbrella.