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Would You Trust All Of Your Financial Services & Money To Elon Musk?

from the his-cars-catch-fire dept

Yes, I’m well are of Betteridge’s Law, and yes, this headline is designed to deliberately obey it.

It’s no surprise that Elon’s grand vision for exTwitter was to try to turn it into a financial services everything app. He’s been talking about such an app for years. It’s what he wanted his original X.com to become, before it merged with Confinity, and which was later renamed PayPal (after a palace coup in which Elon was booted). Elon has always seemed to think that the focus on PayPal was a mistake and he’s never quite given up on his original idea for X.

He’s mentioned a few times during the course of taking over Twitter that it was part of his vision to create this kind of “everything app” with payments as central element. There were reports from the beginning of this year about how Twitter was seeking various licenses to be a financial services firm, and the company has been slowly collecting the proper licenses.

But the latest is that at an “all hands” meeting last week at exTwitter, he apparently told the few remaining exTwitter employees that he wanted them to launch a service for people by the end of next year that would replace all their financial dealings:

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life,” Musk said, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Verge. “If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever. So, it’s not just like send $20 to my friend. I’m talking about, like, you won’t need a bank account.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said the company sees this becoming a “full opportunity” in 2024. “It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk said.

I’m going to suggest there’s a very decent likelihood that Elon’s mind is going to be blown, as this seems unlikely to be rolled out by the end of 2024. I mean, Elon is somewhat famous for stupidly overpromising delivery dates and then either never delivering, or delivering years after the fact.

And doing full on financial services including “money or securities or whatever” is not exactly the easiest thing in the world if you don’t want to end up facing a long, long time in jail (as Sam Bankman-Fried is currently learning).

While some might point to Elon’s exploding rockets and fire-catching cars as reasons to be skeptical of his claims of controlling all your finances, I’ll just remind people that even before Elon took over he was promising fully end-to-end encrypted DMs, which was an actual good idea (but also one that both Twitter and Meta have worked on for years, and both have noted is way, way, way trickier than it seems at first if you want to do it right).

When Musk ordered a few of the remaining engineers at the company to rush out encrypted DMs by a specific deadline, they launched a weak approximation of it, which they plastered with warnings that it was not, in fact, actually end-to-end encrypted DMs. And since then, we’ve basically heard exactly nothing about any plans to ever actually bring truly end-to-end encrypted DMs online.

Given that, it would not surprise me at all if exTwitter launches some sort of extremely sketchy, half-assed, limited payments effort at some point next year. But it will likely be about as trustworthy as the promises in my emails from Nigerian princes.

But, of course, as with the Nigerian prince emails, some people will fall for it. But I can’t see the population of absolutely gullible fools being large enough to help fill the gaping void that used to be Twitter’s revenue streams in the pre-Musk era.

Filed Under: elon musk, financial services, money, payments, securities
Companies: twitter, x

OnlyPrudes: OnlyFans, The Platform For Sexually Explicit Content, Says No More Sexually Explicit Content (Except For Nudes)

from the none-of-this-makes-sense dept

To some extent, it was only a matter of time until this issue came up. OnlyFans has grown massively over the last year (demonstrating, yet again, that the idea that the internet ecosystem is “settled” and that Facebook/Google control all is not necessarily true). However, as most people know, OnlyFans’ success is built on basically creating a paywall for adult content from fans willing to subscribe to certain individuals in order to gain access to paid-only pictures and videos. It has had a tremendous impact especially for sex workers who had their careers shattered by FOSTA a few years ago, which forced a bunch of platforms sex workers relied on to shut down.

But, because it involves sex and adult content, sooner or later people were going to complain. And, complain they did. On Thursday OnlyFans announced that it was banning “sexually explicit” content, though it said it’s still allowing nudity.

Effective October 1, 2021, OnlyFans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit conduct. In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines. Creators will continue to be allowed to post content containing nudity as long as it is consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy.

What does that even mean? It’s extremely unclear. The “Acceptable Use Policy” doesn’t seem to define any difference between sexually explicit and nude content. Instead, it focuses on having the rights to the content you’re posting and not posting illegal content. I can’t wait for the content moderation case study exploring how OnlyFans distinguishes merely “nude” with “sexually explicit.” That’ll be a fun one.

Of course, there’s a lot likely happening behind the scenes here. Just two days earlier OnlyFans announced a separate app of non-adult content, while simultaneously noting that it was having difficulty finding investors, despite its overwhelming success.

It wouldn’t be a surprise for it to eventually come out that part of the issue is… FOSTA. The same law that created such a mess for sex workers since it was passed was likely always a potential risk for OnlyFans. The company is saying that many of its partners — especially in the financial world — were getting cold feet. According to Bloomberg, who broke the news:

The changes are needed because of mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, according to the company.

And, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Remember, payment and banking partners have long been a target for government officials when they want to crack down on things they don’t like — especially sex related things.

Sex workers are already speaking out about this. Cathy Reisenwitz, from Sex and the State put out a statement:

??OnlyFans was the most empowering way for adult creators to connect with our audience. I?ve benefited tremendously from OF personally. But at the end of the day I?ll be fine. I can?t say that about sex workers who depended on OF. Many of them are going to have to turn to in-person sex work, made all the more dangerous by SESTA/FOSTA, to make ends meet. I?m angry our deeply sex-negative, whorephobic society allows lying evangelicals and SWERFs to dictate the limits of our freedom of speech and put sex workers? lives and livelihoods in jeopardy for no benefit to anyone. Every problem, from CSAM to trafficking, that banning porn is supposed to solve is actually exacerbated by stigmatizing and criminalizing online porn.

There are many reasons why some of us think we should be moving to a world where the internet has fewer chokepoints where policymakers and moral panic purveyors can put pressure on just a small handful of companies to choke off speech. Yes, obviously, OnlyFans has every right to decide how it wants to manage its own platform, but the key point here is that this doesn’t seem to be OnlyFans doing this because it thinks it’s best for the site, or for its users (either creators or fans). Rather, it’s because of the intermediaries stepping in to tell them what is and what is not allowed.

Filed Under: adult content, financial services, sex workers, sexually explicit content, subscription services
Companies: onlyfans

JP Morgan Buys Bear Stearns For Pennies On The Dollar; What's It Mean For Tech?

from the bubble-bursting-or-economic-collapse? dept

While not strictly a technology story, JPMorgan’s buyout of Bear Stearns on Sunday is worth looking at in the larger context of the tech industry. As you hopefully know by now, JPMorgan picked up Bear Stearns for 2/share,atotalof2/share, a total of 2/share,atotalof236 million, which is (quite literally) pennies on the dollar for a firm that not so long ago was valued at 170/shareandonFridayalonehadtumbledfromabout170/share and on Friday alone had tumbled from about 170/shareandonFridayalonehadtumbledfromabout55/share to $30/share. On Friday, of course, the Fed stepped in to keep Bear Stearns alive (through JPMorgan) and the weekend was spent trying to figure out options before the Asian markets could open late Sunday night (US time). There will be plenty of Monday-morning quarterbacking on this deal (so it’s fitting that it all played out on a Sunday), but the discussions about the impact on the tech world has been mixed if anything. It would be great to get the perspective of some readers on how this is likely to play out for tech companies (both big and small). While many may be somewhat isolated from a meltdown on Wall Street, there certainly are some important indirect connections. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem like there will be much short-term impact, but the longer-term issues could be worth watching out for.

Filed Under: bailouts, failures, financial services, panic, wall street
Companies: bear stearns, jp morgan