#458
Bringing X (and Y) to Life

What do you get when you combine social commerce and payment flows? According to Elon Musk – the “everything app” – also known in more conventional terms as a super app. While the label “super app” has been thrown around by everyone from Affirm (shopping, payments, and financial services) to Walmart (online purchasing and personal finance), the common thread of unifying consumers’ social and financial lives has emerged.

Few of these businesses, if any, have been able to rival the North Star of super apps: WeChat. An app through which hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens and businesses use on a daily basis, WeChat has consistently expanded to encompass everything from payments, to news and entertainment, to restaurant reservations, to mobility services.

This is likely not due to a lack of comparable innovation in the US, however. Rather, a host of cultural, technological, and political factors have all played a role in creating different conditions for success. Most notably, studies have shown that US consumers enjoy the optionality afforded by multiple apps and have far less willingness to share aggregated data with a single source. From a tech perspective, smartphones allow us to maintain these preferences, whereas lower powered smartphones in China often aren’t suited to manage a large number of separate apps. Lastly, the Chinese government has been a proponent of WeChat’s growth (and the enormous data the app produces), while similar consolidation (and the outright ban of competitors including Google and Facebook) in the US would likely raise flags for antitrust regulators.

These considerations have yet to deter Elon, though. As he tweeted recently, “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Now it’s just a matter of time before we find out whether Elon will follow through with the purchase and begin working on the “everything app” or if he’s moved on from smoking weed to something more powerful.