Now that Elon Musk controls Twitter, he recently prepared a pitch deck for investors that outlines his plans for the company over the next 3-6 years. Along with a 5x revenue increase to $26.4B by 2028, Musk also wants to see 938M users on the platform, increasing revenue per user by 22% to $30.22. What is interesting is that Musk also sees the opportunity to add a robust payments business to the Twitter platform, starting off at a modest $15m revenue contribution in 2023 and growing to a $1.3B business by 2028. Twitter’s revenue from payments is negligible today, and while Musk has offered no details on what a Twitter Payments business would look like, his tenure at industry giant PayPal tells us his plans are likely to gain traction.
Regardless of what the new and improved Twitter Payments looks like, it will become another way for consumers to embed payments into the fabric of our daily lives. Now that Apple has enabled NFC capabilities on the iPhone to accept contactless cards, a Twitter business payments app or P2P check-splitting capabilities are not that much of a stretch of the imagination.
Overview by Don Apgar, Director, Merchant Services Advisory Practice at Mercator Advisory Group