Key Takeaways
Since he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has sought to reimagine the platform as something much more ambitious than previously, with plans that go far beyond simply rebranding it as X.
In a recent post on X, Musk once again raised the concept of the “everything app ,” calling on prospective software engineers to send examples of their code to be considered for a job.
Crucially, he insisted, “We don’t care where you went to school or even whether you went to school.”
Musk’s view on higher education mirrors that of his PayPal co-founder and former mentor, Peter Thiel.
Since 2010, Thiel has paid budding entrepreneurs $100,000 to drop out of school to start a company, reasoning that many people whose time would be better spent outside of education only stay through a lack of alternative paths to success.
The backdrop to Musk and Thiel’s anti-college ethos is a university system that is more oriented toward research and doesn’t necessarily prepare graduates to start businesses.
Many of Silicon Valley’s most successful founders from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college to pursue their big ideas.
This lineage of high-flying dropouts, including Steve Jobs, Larry Elison, and Jack Dorsey, has helped cultivate the U.S. tech industry’s self-image as a hive of disruption characterized by bold thinkers running against the grain.
While their position has a pragmatic element, for Musk and Thiel it is also political.
Commenting on his program in 2024, Thiel suggested Ivy League schools were “corrupt institutions” adding that “over the last three to four years it’s even more woke, it’s even less meritocratic.”
For Musk, raging against prestigious universities chimes with his stance on “woke” campus politics.
In October 2023, Musk gathered X employees to describe his vision for the future of the platform.
“We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app,” he said. The new direction would build an “all-inclusive feature set” with the goal of turning X into “a single application that encompasses everything.”
Musk described a platform that combines payments, messaging, video, and more, using China’s WeChat as a model.
The biggest development in the first year of Musk’s ownership was the introduction of in-app video and audio calls. However, X also made “radical improvements to video in general,” Musk said in the meeting.
“For payments,” meanwhile, “we’re really just waiting for all the approvals, which we should hopefully get in the next few months,” he added.
Over a year later, X Payments has received a string of licenses across the U.S., but details of the planned payment system remain under wraps.
On the messaging front, the biggest changes have been the introduction of an edit function and new encryption settings. Musk suggested that the platform could even embrace email .