The confirmation locks in a timeline Musk has toyed with since buying Twitter in 2022 and re-branding it as X. X Money is envisioned as a full wallet and banking stack that sits natively inside the social network, edging it toward Tencent’s WeChat model. Internal milestones suggest a broader US rollout “later this year,” but Musk’s caveat underscores that initial testers will number in the low thousands at most, giving engineers a controlled environment in which to watch balances and transfers behave under real stress.
Earlier this month two Manhattan lawmakers urged DFS to deny X Money’s application, warning that Musk’s “pattern of reckless conduct” made him unfit to handle consumer funds. “What we’re talking about is nothing less than Elon Musk becoming a permanent part of the country’s financial infrastructure—with access to enormous quantities of consumer data,” Assemblymember Micah Lasher said in a letter.
California—another heavyweight jurisdiction—granted its licence in late 2024, smoothing the path for Visa to become X Money’s first network partner. At January’s CES, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said users would fund an in-app “X Wallet” instantly via Visa Direct and move money to bank accounts in real time, adding that the Visa tie-in was “the first of many big announcements” for 2025.
If the limited beta proceeds without incident, X Payments expects to widen access state-by-state as remaining licences land. New York’s verdict looms largest; success there would unlock Wall Street users and cement X’s claim to national coverage. Even without Dogecoin and crypto rails, the service positions X to levy interchange and wallet fees—a new revenue channel for a platform still “barely breaking even,” as Musk admitted to staff in January.
At press time, Dogecoin traded at $0.228.
