Elon Musk is eyeing more than just your wallet; he’s interested in your love life, too.
Last week, on its first anniversary under Musk’s helm, Twitter, now known as X, had a rare all-encompassing meeting with all staff. The Verge shared a full transcript of the meeting, showing Musk, who spoke for most of the time, spent a large part of the 45-minute discussion talking about his big plans for X as a future “everything app.”
Several months after Twitter transitioned to X, Musk commemorated the anniversary of his acquisition of the platform by announcing to his staff via a video conference his intention to introduce a comprehensive dating feature to the app in 2024.
Business Insider reported that additional info about how the dating aspect of the app would function remains fuzzy. During the same discussion, Musk also expressed his aspiration to evolve X into a practical digital banking instrument, thereby transforming the social media platform into an “all-encompassing app.”
Since buying the company, Musk has been searching for new ways to make money. Right after he bought it, he started letting go of some workers because advertisers left, and the platform’s value dropped by half.
Forbes reported that changing the name from “Twitter” might have made the platform lose around $20 billion USD in value. A person told Business Insider that Musk’s ideas for X seem to be different from what “users really want,” especially if they have to pay for more services. The timeline for launching the dating feature within the app remains unclear.
“Obviously, I found someone and friends of mine have found people on the platform,” Musk conveyed to the personnel at X, as per the transcript, further adding that “you can tell if you’re a good match based on what they write.”
“So, X Dating around the corner then?” inquired X CEO Linda Yaccarino.
“Yeah,” Musk affirmed, as recorded in the transcript. “There’s already some stuff happening to some degree. But I think we might be able to improve the dating situation.”
Musk really wants the dating feature because he thinks the “discovery” part of dating is important. He says it’s tough to find people who think like you do—and he thinks looking at a user’s Twitter history could help with that.
“Part of it is how do you discover interesting people?” Musk mused. “Discovery is tough.“
It’s certainly not a mystery that many couples meet on social media; before apps like Twitter and Instagram, there was no “sliding into someone’s DMs.” In fact, I met my ex-bf on Twitter and could name 20 other people who met their romantic partners through the app as well.
Yet, it’s unclear how X could manage the mammoth challenge of transforming a Twitter user’s history into a matchmaking algorithm people will be itching to use instead of utilizing an already-established dedicated dating app.
But you never know—all social media platforms have created plenty of romantic couples—it’s just been organic and not based on any kind of algorithm.
It’s not such an “out there” idea if we’re being honest—it makes more sense than a banking app, at least to us.
