Also, "why Visa" from the X.com perspective. As far as I can tell, Musk's vision was WeChat for the Western world. The platform for everything. WeChat replaces Visa, it doesn't use Visa or a competitor. If X.com is using Visa then Visa is the platform, not X.com. Using Visa feels like an admission of defeat to me.
I imagine it has to do with the difficulty of financial compliance. Musk was part of PayPal which has gotten into trouble before for being not quite a bank and attempting to do bank-like things.
Yes, it's hard. That's the point. Visa is a monopoly that makes monopoly sized profits. (Visa's $20B of income is misleading, that's tiny compared to the profit the banks issuing Visa cards make).
If Musk could crack the Visa monopoly X.com would be worth a lot more than the $44B he paid for it. He's the richest man in the world because his companies do hard things.
Landing a rocket on a barge bobbing in the ocean is difficult. Tesla not being on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man... is difficult. Sending 280 character messages across the internet is not difficult in comparison. Breaking the Visa monopoly, OTOH...
Musk has consistently pushed his companies into higher risk acceptance and financed those moon-shots to deliver a product that had a demand but not a supply (reusable rockets, electric cars, low-orbit internet satellite network). Also the tunnel thing, neuralink, and a handful of other smaller and less successful gambits.
I don't see him having the same benefits tackling financial transactions. There are already multiple players with significant regulatory capture, significant centralization, on top of established reputations.
Financial payments is a cartel wherever you go. In China it's not better, it's just different players; AliPay and WePay. In fact UnionPay is probably more of a cartel since it's the only card authorizer in China.
A couple of companies have tried their hand at a western mega-app, most notably Meta, and you could consider Apple close, but for the most part the consumers are not super interested.
