Elon Musk’s Quixotic Quest to Turn X Into an ‘Everything App’

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Four years ago, a billionaire tech executive leading one of the world’s pre-eminent social platforms laid out a vision to transform it into an app that could do it all. In an online manifesto, he wrote that the app would not only be central to written communications but have audio, video, payments, commerce and more. 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 chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In a 2019 blog post, Mr. 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. Mr. Zuckerberg tried it. So did Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive 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.