Elon Musk, the TeslaTSLA billionaire and owner of X, has played havoc with the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent years—recently confirming wild rumors of a plot to replace PayPalPYPL.
The bitcoin price, after surging into the new year on the back of a BlackRock-led Wall Street crypto invasion, has stalled, with fears swirling the Federal Reserve could be about to trigger a crypto crash.
Now, after Elon Musk revealed his personal crypto holdings, his social media platform X has quietly received another money-transmitter license, adding to a clutch that of state approvals as it looks to “revolutionize” payments in 2024.
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X, which Musk has said he wants to transform into a so-called “everything app,” was granted a money-transmitter license from Utah last week, the 15th U.S. state green light the company’s plans to offer payments, it was reported by Reuters.
Last week, Musk’s X reiterated its plans to compete with the likes of PayPal, VisaVV and even banks as part of a plan “to revolutionize 2024 with groundbreaking products and services that will reshape how we connect, communicate, and transact.”
“We will launch peer-to-peer payments, unlocking more user utility and new opportunities for commerce, and showcasing the power of living more of your life in one place,” the blog post read.
Meanwhile, Musk has confirmed he still owns a lot of “joke” bitcoin rival dogecoin, a meme-based cryptocurrency Musk once said he wanted to make “the currency of Earth.”
“I still own a bunch of dogecoin, and SpaceX owns a bunch of bitcoin,” Musk said during an X Spaces broadcast. Musk’s electric car company Tesla also holds just over 10,000 bitcoin worth almost $500 million.
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In October, a leaked “all-hands” virtual meeting at X revealed Musk’s plans to grow X’s financial services arm, with prominent voices in the bitcoin and crypto space calling the plan something that could spur a “critical mass” of crypto adoption.
“If it involves money. It’ll be on our platform. Money or securities or whatever,” Musk said at the time.
Musk, who has previously said he wants to turn X into an “updated version” of PayPal, has helped the price of bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, including the meme-based dogecoin, surge over the last few years as he teases crypto integration and adoption.
PayPal has leaned into bitcoin and crypto over the last few years, launching its own dollar-pegged stablecoin cryptocurrency after rolling out support for bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash in late 2020. PayPal’s original support for bitcoin and crypto helped kick off the 2021 bitcoin price bull run that catapulted bitcoin to almost $70,000.
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