Silicon Valley has also toyed for years with trying to build its own super apps on the notion that a strong payments platform could power sprawling services in the same way WeChat Pay does. But Facebook’s efforts to build payment services, including with a crypto platform called Libra, fell apart, and while WeChat’s dominance comes in part from working in lockstep with the Chinese government, US Big Tech firms have an altogether different relationship with regulators and the state: they’re facing calls to be broken up.

Slimming down looks like a wise financial strategy anyway. Facebook has shut down an array of business segments, while Instagram has been rolling back features after criticisms it was becoming too bloated.

If Musk were truly determined, he could try and buy PayPal from EBay, closing a meaningful loop for himself after co-founding PayPal’s predecessor more than two decades ago. It was named x.com. Twitter historically adds incremental features to its platform, so a comprehensive payments service would probably need to be bought and bolted on. (As it happens, none of the original PayPal co-founders are on the board of eBay today and thus in a position to help smooth that along.)

But Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey could have already done that back when he was leading both Twitter and the payments giant Square, now called Block. Why didn’t he merge the two and create a super app when he could? Most likely, because he recognised it wouldn’t work: US consumers weren’t ready for a Swiss Army knife of apps, and it’d raise hackles with regulators too.

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In any case, it’s probably not the best idea for someone as volatile as Musk to oversee an app on which millions engage in social commentary, payments, shopping, identification and more. It would give the world’s richest man, infamous for his unreliability, a new level of unprecedented power that he – and we – could probably do without.

Musk has a giant fan base thanks to Tesla and is a masterful self-promoter. But he also has a habit of making grand promises and not following through. There’s a decent chance this is just another idea that fizzles out eventually too. Let’s hope so.

Bloomberg

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