"I think we might be able to improve the dating situation."
Billionaire Matchmaker
Elon Musk doesn't just want your finances. He wants a hand in your dating life, too.
Last week, to celebrate its one-year anniversary of Musk ownership, Twitter — or X, as it's now called — held a rare and wide-ranging all-hands meeting. As a full transcript of the meeting shared by The Verge shows, Musk, who spoke for the majority of the meeting, used most of the 45-minute assembly to discuss his grander vision for X as a future "everything app."
That vision, he told staff, includes gaining control over X users' "financial lives" via an extensive in-app banking network, replacing platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn, and introducing a video call feature like Apple's FaceTime. And he also, apparently, wants to turn X into a dating app — you know, because all of us want to put our romantic lives in the hands of a thrice-divorced, red-pilled billionaire obsessed with having scores of babies.
"Obviously, I found someone and friends of mine have found people on the platform," Musk told X staffers, according to the transcript, adding that "you can tell if you're a good match based on what they write."
"So, X Dating around the corner then?" X CEO Linda Yaccarino — who spoke very sparsely during the meeting — cut in.
"Yeah," Musk responded, according to the transcript. "There's already some stuff happening to some degree. But I think we might be able to improve the dating situation."
Burnt Hair Seduction
Musk's push for the dating feature hinged strongly on the idea on the "discovery" aspect of dating. Basically, he says, it's hard to find like-minded people — and to him, a user's Twitter history might solve that problem.
"Part of it is how do you discover interesting people?" the billionaire pondered. "Discovery is tough."
On the one hand, it's true that couples meet on social media all the time; prior to the advent of apps like Twitter and Instagram, the concept of "sliding into the DMs" didn't exist. What's unclear, however, is how X might accomplish the very tall task of distilling a Twitter user's history into an effective matchmaking algorithm that people actually use. After all, when was the last time that any of us thought about Facebook Dating? (Yes, it apparently still exists.)
Look, Musk isn't the first billionaire who's set his eyes on monetizing wide-ranging access to day-to-day human life. But Silicon Valley has been chasing the White Whale of the "everything app" for a while, and though we could see a few of the remaining Elon stans out there spritzing on a hit of that sweet sweet Burnt Hair perfume and hitting X Dating's proverbial streets, we're just not sure that Musk's "everything" dream is ripe for a wider audience.
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