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Key Points
- X Money has officially launched peer-to-peer payments for X Premium subscribers.
- It comes after a months-long beta and marks the first real public test of the “everything app” Elon Musk first pitched in 1999.
- The rollout puts hard facts behind Luke Lango’s “Bank of Elon” prediction: FDIC coverage of up to $10 million per user, a metal Visa debit card, yields near 6%, and a potential base of roughly 600 million X users.
X Money is now officially live…
Peer-to-peer payments are now open for U.S.-based X Premium subscribers, ending a beta period that had dragged on for longer than expected.
And early public proof came fast. X user @CoreyTheX posted:
Call me an idiot, but I just sent $25 directly to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world using @XMoney for no other reason than I just can. lol
Elon responded simply, “Tks” with a laughing emoji.
Now comes the real test… Will what Luke Lango, the lead technology analyst at InvestorPlace, calls the “Bank of Elon” be able to turn into the “everything app” that Musk has been building toward for decades?
As we noted shortly after SpaceX (SPCX) filed to go public, its SEC filings mentioned xAI 400 times and Starlink 381 times… but referred to X Money only as a vague “Money Product” buried between the rockets and satellites.
We called it a free call option for SpaceX investors ahead of the IPO…
A call option gives you the upside exposure to an asset without paying full price for it today. Buy SPCX, and you own a share of Falcon 9, Starlink, Grok, and the rest. You’ll also own a sliver of X Money, valued at essentially nothing by the vast majority of Wall Street.
But as Luke Lango has publicly predicted in an exclusive interview… this “Bank of Elon” product could ultimately dwarf the profits investors have made on Tesla or even the upcoming SpaceX IPO.
If X Money stays a small payments app… it’ll also likely stay a rounding error on the SpaceX balance sheet. But if Luke is right and it becomes what Musk says he wants it to be, the math changes completely.
These X Money Features Are Live Now
The X Money product that went live looks less like a peer-to-peer app like Venmo and more like a full bank…
Subscribers can now send money to any X account, link an outside bank, and hold dollar balances inside the app. In addition, those funds are protected via Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) coverage using a “cash sweep program.”
That spreads balances across partner banks and lifts the insured ceiling to $10 million per user… far higher than most regular bank accounts, which limit users to $250,000 in protection per account. And competitors PayPal (PYPL) and Venmo offer no FDIC protection at all to standard wallet balances.
In addition, we got confirmation on a few things we laid out in our deep dive on Luke’s “Bank of Elon” prediction:
Users can set up direct deposit to fund the account and receive a metal Visa debit card with up to 3% cashback and zero foreign transaction fees.
In addition, the yield on balances is where things start to look unusual. Beta participants have reported earning up to 6% APY on their X Money balances.
For comparison, the national average savings rate at U.S. banks sits below 0.6%. So a customer with $50,000 sitting in their X Money account would earn around $3,000 a year, versus roughly $300 at a typical bank.
We’ll see how long that 10 times yield gap lasts… but for now, it’s a strong incentive to the nearly 600 million active X users to give X Money a try. Convert even a tenth of them and X Money instantly rivals Zelle, Venmo, and Cash App, apps that each spent a decade getting there.
To be clear, that conversion rate isn’t a sure thing… But it also isn’t crazy…
Earlier this year, X’s new “Cashtags” feature drove upward of $1 billion in trading volume within just two days of its launch. As Yahoo Finance reported:
The feature, which launched Tuesday night, lets users tap stock and crypto tickers inside posts to view live price charts and related discussions without leaving the app. X head of product Nikita Bier said the estimate was based on aggregated data from the company’s trading pilot.
The early traction gives more shape to what X is actually trying to build. Cashtags are not just another market-data layer inside a social feed. They are part of a broader effort to keep discovery, discussion and action closer together on one platform.
In addition, when the company launched its XChat messaging product, it quickly climbed to the top of the Apple (AAPL) app store on launch day… beating out both ChatGPT and Claude, which had held the top free spots for much of the past year.
Musk has an uncanny ability to do what most folks think is impossible. And right now, his stated goal is for X Money to become “the place where all the money is, the central source of all monetary transactions.”
The ‘Everything App’ for a $480 Trillion Market
If that happens, it points to a potential $480 trillion market and the biggest change to American banking in more than 50 years.
And Luke has spent months arguing that X Money is the biggest overlooked story in the market. He calls it the “Bank of Elon.”
As Luke put it when examining why X Money could be far bigger than PayPal ever was:
And lest you think this is science fiction, just look to China. WeChat – which is also called “The Everything App” – launched its banking features in 2013. Within a few years, nearly 1 billion people were using that app to pay for groceries, invest in the market, split restaurant bills, and send money to family. Mobile payments now account for over 80% of all transactions in China. Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, rewarded investors with a 20x return when mobile banking took off.
X Money is the American version of that story. Except Elon Musk has significantly more users, significantly more political tailwind, and significantly more audacity.
This idea also fits with what we’ve been tracking all year. Musk isn’t running separate companies anymore. He’s assembling an empire, piece by piece. As we wrote when breaking down his Macrohard AI project:
That merger folded together SpaceX’s rockets and Starlink satellite network, xAI’s Grok model and data centers, and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Then Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI in January. Now Macrohard formally ties in Tesla’s hardware and computer vision expertise.
The same empire that owns the space-launch market with a 99.5% success rate, is buying up billions of dollars in Dark Energy gas turbines to power its AI data centers, and runs a social platform with hundreds of millions of daily users…
Well, now it wants to be your bank too.
What This Means for SpaceX Investors
Every time a new technology has changed how Americans use money, it has produced a new set of winners…
- The telegraph gave us Western Union’s (WU) wire transfers in 1871, allowing customers to send money from coast to coast.
- A forgotten wallet at dinner gave us the Diners Club card in 1950, and ultimately credit-card giants like Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V).
- PayPal made paying a stranger on the Internet even simpler than sending an email.
Luke believes that X Money is the next big winner here… with a potential for 10 times or more gains.
But Luke isn’t simply telling his subscribers to buy SpaceX. Instead, he has written a special report laying out exactly what to expect as the Bank of Elon develops. It’s titled “How to Make 1,000% From the Bank of Elon“… and it details the 19 public companies that are most critical to X Money’s rollout.
You can learn how to get access to Luke’s report immediately by clicking here to go straight to the subscription page, without watching any sort of video.
Or if you’d prefer, you can watch Luke’s full exclusive interview on the Bank of Elon here to hear him explain the opportunity in his own words.
