Elon Musk edges closer to his 'everything app' dream as Twitter enables trading via eToro
- Twitter has partnered with brokerage firm eToro to give users more financial data.
- If they choose to trade, they can also access eToro's site through the social-media app.
Twitter and the brokerage firm eToro will allow the social-media app's users to trade stocks and other assets, including crypto.
By offering a service outside of social media functions, the collaboration marks a step toward turning Twitter into an "everything app," something CEO Elon Musk has said he plans to do since taking over the company last year for $44 billion.
Although Twitter users have been able to look up financial data since 2022 through "Cashtags" by typing in a dollar sign and ticker symbol, the partnership will expand the amount of financial assets that can be viewed.
And if a user wants to invest, Twitter will then take them to eToro's site, where they can trade stocks, cryptocurrencies and index funds. The new feature will begin appearing in the app on Thursday, eToro disclosed to CNBC.
Twitter's new trading feature comes after Musk merged Twitter under the X Corp this week and filed for regulatory licenses that would facilitate in-app payments.
Musk has plans to create a go-to app for a variety of services, and in October, he tweeted, "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app."
Musk has been talking about building X for months. In August, when a Twitter user asked him whether he had considered creating his own social platform, he replied, "X.com" — a web domain he bought over five years ago.
At Tesla's annual shareholder meeting that same month, Musk said he had "a pretty grand vision" for X as "something that would be very useful to the world."
And Musk indicated in May that he might look for inspiration from Tencent's WeChat, a Chinese social media juggernaut that's one of the largest super-apps in the world.
"If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat," he said. "It does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. It's really an excellent app, and we don't have anything like that outside of China."