For years, Elon Musk has ballyhooed X plans for a new payments tool, with the social media company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino leading the way. But now she’s out.
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X,” she said in a post Wednesday on the company’s site.
Since the billionaire purchased the former Twitter business for $44 billion in October 2022, Musk has been talking about expanding the platform into payments with a digital wallet. Yaccarino crowed in January about making X into an “everything app” for consumers.
A year earlier, in January 2024, Musk had said the company would launch the payments tool by year-end. “I would be surprised if it takes longer than the middle of [2024] to roll out payments,” Musk said at that time.
But that was before he was pulled deeper into politics, taking an on-again, off-again relationship with President Donald Trump, whom he helped place in the White House with nearly $300 million in contributions. Now, estranged from his one-time presidential ally, Musk said Monday he’s forming a new U.S. political party.
The X payments tool idea predates Musk taking leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency, and pursuing federal agency cost-cuts that ripped into his reputation. His political moves also tarnished the images of his companies, including electric vehicle maker Tesla, as it lifted X rivals like Bluesky.
Musk once hoped the X payments app would help quintuple the social media platform’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion in six years, with the payments business contributing $1.3 billion, according to an October 2022 report from The New York Times.
The company could still be on course with that strategy, despite Yaccarino’s departure, but new leadership always raises the possibility of a shift in direction. Executives at X didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A major development for X came in January when the company said it would work with card network giant Visa to launch the new payments tool, called X Money, this year. At the time, Yaccarino said it was the first of “many big announcements about X Money this year.” (She probably didn’t envision her own resignation as one of them.)
San Francisco-based Visa acknowledged the new alliance at the time, and pointed to its real-time payments brand Visa Direct as being involved in the new X endeavor. “Visa Direct will make it possible for US X Money Account users to fund and transfer money in real-time with their debit card,” Visa said in commenting on Yaccarino’s January post. The company this week didn’t respond to a request for an update on the tool.
X has so far collected 41 state money transfer licenses, or alternative state permits, according to the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System. While it was gathering them at a rapid pace in prior years, the campaign has slowed this year.
An important state from which X hasn’t nabbed a license is New York. That state has been progressive in its approach to digital payments advances, including with respect to cryptocurrencies, but it has also taken a stricter regulatory view of some payments plays, including with respect to earned wage access.
Montana is another holdout, but it doesn’t provide such licenses.
In any case, New York is still arguably the financial capital of the country so any digital wallet would seemingly want to operate in that state. In addition, true nationwide coverage for such a business would include New York.
The company’s next CEO will apparently have to take up the task of bringing X Money across the finish line, if that happens.
