Twitter has entered into a partnership with eToro, a social trading company, to offer financial services on Twitter, suggesting that Elon Musk is setting off his ambition to make the microblogging app a big financial hub.
eToro revealed the move in an interview with CNBC, saying the partnership will allow Twitter users to access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets.
Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively.
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The move comes on the heels of Musk’s push to establish a super app dubbed X Corp. that will put together all his businesses, making it easy for users to do a lot of things within the app. The move mirrors Chinese tech giant Tencent’s super app, which has seen its social media app – Wechat – metamorphosed into a payment giant serving millions of people.
Twitter has set the ball rolling by making it possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. CNBC had reported that the financial service can be done using Twitter’s “cashtags” feature — you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API.
An eToro spokesperson told CNBC that the partnership will see Twitter cashtgs expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes. eToro uses TradingView as its market data partner. The spokesperson explains that the feature will provide users with the ability to click a button that says “view on eToro,” which takes you through to eToro’s site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform.
“As we’ve grown over the past three years immensely, we’ve seen more and more of our users interact on Twitter [and] educate themselves about the markets,” Yoni Assia, eToro’s CEO, told CNBC.
“There is very high quality content, real-time content on financial analysis of companies and what’s happening around the world. We believe this partnership will enable us to reach those new audiences [and] connect better the brands of Twitter and eToro.”
Musk has been seeking ways to increase Twitter’s revenue since he generously dumped $44 billion on the platform’s acquisition late last year. He admitted that the twitter was overpriced but said in a tweet that buying the company was an “accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
Musk owns the domain “X.com” — a payment company he started and eventually merged with PayPal.
X Corp.’s merger with Twitter was submitted on March 15 following the company’s set up on March 9 in Nevada, per the records filed in the state. But Musk had in last April, set up a trio of holding companies in Delaware with a variation of the name “X Holdings”, as part of his bid to acquire Twitter.
eToro, which was founded in 2007 in Israel, offers online brokerage services that let users buy and sell stocks, cryptocurrency and index funds. Its partnership with Twitter marks a significant move in the company’s push to become everything app.
eToro has more than 32 million registered users across Europe, Asia and the United States, according to Assia. One of the company’s most popular features, which allows people to mimic the trading strategies of other users, is expected to form the driving force of the partnership’s growth.
However, analysts have doubted Musk’s chances to succeed in his quest to develop X Corp. as a super app.
“Musk could create a parent structure, similar to Alphabet, where he has all his companies,” said Mandeep Singh, analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. “I don’t see how he can layer e-commerce or payments in Twitter right when larger peers such as Alphabet and Meta have struggled to become an everything app on the consumer side.”
But Assia told CNBC that “Fintwit,” or financial twitter, has become a popular trend on the app, which many people use to find breaking news and updates on stocks and other assets. He said he worked with the same team at Twitter on the stock market data tool that he had worked with on previous partnerships with the company.
It is not clear what other plans Musk is exploring in order to make Twitter his dream everything app. But he said in a Morgan Stanley conference last month that he wants Twitter to become “the biggest financial institution in the world.”
However, this will force a lot of changes on twitter, including an increase of headcount that Musk drastically reduced from 7,500 to 1,500 in a bid to cut costs.