According to Yahoo News, Elon Musk's company X, formerly known as Twitter, has been granted three additional money transmitter licenses in the US states of South Dakota, Kansas, and Wyoming. This brings the total number of states where the company is allowed to engage in money transfers to twelve. The other states where the company had previously been granted a money transmitter license include Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
The registrations are associated with a business named 'X Payments LLC,' formerly 'Twitter Payments LLC,' which will operate the money transfer operations at X. Musk confirmed the additions in a post on X, in response to an article by The Street which noted the Nov. 27 addition of South Dakota. The Street's reporting indicated the company had only been registered in 10 states, according to the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System's database. Now, the database is showing the most recent additions, as well.
Musk has previously spoken about his plans to morph X into a payments platform, having earlier detailed his vision for the future of the company shortly after the acquisition. He has described X as a place where users would be able to send money to others on the platform, and extract their funds to authenticated bank accounts, and perhaps later, a high-yield money market account that would encourage people to keep their cash in accounts with X. This plan would put X into competition with PayPal, a company Musk is crediting with co-founding via its merger with his X.com.
Payments are also tied into X's broader move into the creator economy, where X users with at least 500 followers and 5 million organic impressions on their posts over the past 3 months can become eligible for ads revenue sharing. However, X's ability to monetize via ads has taken a downturn in recent days, as an advertiser exodus was prompted by Musk's endorsement of an antisemitic post on the platform and reports that brands' campaigns were appearing next to hate speech. As a result, X has lost several larger advertisers, including Apple, Disney, IBM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, Comcast/NBCU, Walmart and others. The company said it would focus on small business advertisers in the near term and is also planning to make Musk's new AI, Grok, available to X's paid subscribers as another source of revenue.
