The Blubber

Elon Musk outlined plans to offer banking and payments services on Twitter during a nearly hour-long Q&A session with the social media platform’s staff Thursday.

During the call, a recording of which was obtained by the Verge, Musk shared his plans to allow Twitter users to maintain a cash balance on the platform, in a move that would turn the site into “the people’s financial institution.”

During a Thursday call with Twitter staff, Musk shared his plans to allow users to maintain a cash balance on the platform. He also hinted at the possibility of offering loans.

“Give them some amount of money, like ten bucks or something, that they can send anywhere in the system,” he said, according to a transcript posted by the Verge. “We need money transfer licenses for that, which we’ve applied for.”

Twitter on Friday filed paperwork with the Treasury Department to become a payments processor, according to the Financial Times.

Musk talked about establishing a high-yield money market account “so that having a Twitter balance is the highest-yield thing that you can do.”

“This is very complex and expensive. If you can simply have one balance on Twitter that can simply go positive or negative, and when it goes positive, the interest rate is better than what you could receive elsewhere, and when it goes negative, the interest rate is lower than what you see elsewhere, now you have a much simpler system,” he said.