GoKawiilImagine you’re an X user who’s actually excited to make the app your primary payments app after X Money finally launched Monday for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers after years of delays.
You transfer funds and set things up so that your paychecks automatically deposit to X, where you expect to receive cashback rewards and a high annual yield of 6 percent on your funds—a rate that’s genuinely competitive with some banks.
But once you’ve put your money in the app, you realize that X Money has a lot of limitations. Most glaringly, you can currently only send peer-to-peer payments to other X users who have access to X Money and are 18 and older.
And most problematically, if you add the X Card to a wallet like Google Pay or Apple Pay, you can’t use it to make purchases everywhere nationwide. X does not have money transmitter licenses in “two of the largest financial markets in the country,” Tech Times noted in a very thorough analysis of X Money’s features and potential drawbacks. Neither New York nor Massachusetts will accept X Money payments, and experts previously told Ars that New York’s exclusion alone would seem to be a barrier to X becoming a significant disruptor in the payments market.
Daniela Hawkins, a global payments expert for tech consultancy Capco, told Ars in 2024 that any inconsistency in how payments function could stall widespread adoption of X Money. (Elon Musk was initially trying to launch the app by the end of that year.)
If users can’t easily tell when a payment will be accepted, that uncertainty will likely create enough friction to make Musk’s payments launch “bumpy,” Hawkins suggested.