Western social media companies have long dreamt of creating an everything app that can operate on the same scale as WeChat. In China, online activities are grouped in one place - shopping, payments, subscriptions, messaging and entertainment. Parent company Tencent takes a cut of financial transactions. WeChat is less reliant on advertising revenue than US platforms.
Elon Musk sees potential. When he agreed to buy Twitter he told employees there was an opportunity to build a WeChat equivalent outside China. His first tweet since agreeing to honour the deal stated that it was an accelerant to creating “X, the everything app.”
If Musk could turn Twitter into a super app he would radically transform its business. WeChat revenues, included in Tencent’s “Fintech and Business Services” were Rmb42.2bn ($5.9bn) in the last quarter — five times the size of Twitter’s.