X launches X Money, partnering with Visa

In January 2025, X announced X Money, a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments product with Visa as the first partner, letting users fund a balance and send money instantly. X Corp. registered as a money-services business with FinCEN and obtained money-transmitter licenses across dozens of US states to operate.

X Money is the financial core of Musk’s long-stated plan to turn X into an “everything app” on the model of China’s WeChat — combining social media, messaging, payments and AI in one place. It revives the original ambition of X.com, the online bank Musk founded in 1999 that became PayPal.

The strategic logic is that payments are the glue of a true everything-app: once money moves natively inside X, the platform can power creator payouts, tipping, peer transfers, subscriptions and eventually commerce without surrendering margin to outside processors. It is a striking full-circle moment — more than two decades after a board pushed Musk out of the company he wanted to call X.com, he is finally building the financial super-app he originally envisioned, this time atop a platform with hundreds of millions of users.