New documents submitted to state regulators for license applications are shedding light on how Elon Musk plans to make his X app into a payment platform that competes with services like Venmo and PayPal. Plans include letting users store money within their X accounts that can then be applied to purchases — including in physical stores — or issuing payment to other individuals or businesses. The filings come as X seeks to expand its revenue pool beyond advertising, which had in its Twitter days accounted for as much as 90 percent of sales. Ad income is said to have fallen below that threshold since Musk purchased the company in October 2022.

Musk, who was a PayPal founder, has said he aspires to make X “the largest financial institution in the world,” according to Bloomberg, which was the first to report on the state licensing docs.

“The documents show that X doesn’t plan to charge significant fees for its payment services, though, and the company has told regulators it sees offering payments as a way to boost its business through ‘increased participation and engagement’ on the app,” Bloomberg notes.

Financial details shared in the regulatory documents also highlight what Bloomberg calls X’s “financial woes” since Musk took over, showing that “X generated $1.48 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2023, down almost 40 percent from the same period in 2022, before Musk bought the company.” The company also “lost $456 million in the first quarter of 2023.”

In the search for alternative revenue streams, “X will soon be moving the ability to live stream behind its premium paywall,” according to Engadget, which says “the change will make X the only major social platform to charge for the feature, which is currently free on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and TikTok.”

“This mean that people witnessing an in-progress news event will no longer be able to quickly switch on an X live stream, and broadcast it to the world,” writes Social Media Today, noting that limitation “seemingly goes against Elon’s own ‘citizen journalism’ view for the app.”

But Social Media Today adds that the change also addresses what X has apparently found to be a “problem with copyright and piracy violations in the app, with many users streaming illegal content via its live option,” and that “moving live streaming to a Premium-only feature will help to address this, while also improving the overall quality of content in the app.”