Elon Musk's X Money is finally reaching more people, and one of the first things some of them did with it was send Musk himself money, for no reason at all. The payments service built into X
Elon Musk's X Money is finally reaching more people, and one of the first things some of them did with it was send Musk himself money, for no reason at all.
The payments service built into X (formely Twitter) expanded to a wider set of U.S. users on June 25, after months of delays.
Almost immediately, people began wiring the world's richest man small amounts just to watch it work.
"Call me an idiot, but I just sent $25 directly to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world using @XMoney for no other reason than I just can," one user, Corey, posted. Musk replied: "Tks."
Elon Musk is the world's richest person and, after SpaceX's June 12, 2026 IPO, the first individual ever worth more than $1 trillion. His net worth stood at roughly $1.23 trillion in mid-June 2026, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with Forbes putting it near $1.2 trillion. The fortune rests mainly on his stakes in SpaceX (about 41%) and Tesla (about 20%).
Related: Dogecoin rallies as Elon Musk’s lawyer prepares $200M treasury company
To understand why Musk cares so much about this, you have to go back to 1999.
That year he co-founded a startup called X.com with $12 million of his own money, a no-fee "everything" bank offering checking, savings, brokerage, and insurance in one place. It was years ahead of its time.
Then it merged with Peter Thiel's Confinity, the partners feuded, and in 2000 Musk was pushed out of his own company while flying to Sydney on his honeymoon. By the time he landed, his board had ousted him and renamed the company PayPal.
X Money is, in the most literal sense, the product Musk wanted to build a quarter-century ago.
X Money launched as a dollar-based payments app, similair to Venmo or Cash App than to a crypto wallet, built on a partnership with Visa. The core features:
X holds money-transmitter licenses in more than 40 states and is aiming the app squarely at X's roughly 600 million monthly users, who can tip creators, pay bills, buy in-app, and send each other money without leaving the platform.
Related: Democratic Senator slams X Money in blistering letter to Elon Musk
The average U.S. savings account pays under 1%, and even the best online high-yield accounts have topped out around 4% to 5%. So 6% is eye-catching, but analysts are skeptical it is built to last.
Ken Tumin, the founder of DepositAccounts and a longtime tracker of savings rates, called it a promotional rate that requires a direct-deposited paycheck and is open only to a limited set of beta users.
"Over time, expect the rate to fall in line with competitors," he wrote. For context, he noted, the highest-yielding FDIC-insured savings accounts currently top out around 4.6%, and even Vanguard's federal money-market funds yield closer to 3.6%, near the Federal Reserve's target range.
Tumin also warned that X Money's deposits are held not by X but by its partner, Cross River Bank, the same fintech-and-bank arrangement behind apps like Chime, which he called "more risky than dealing directly with a bank," pointing to the 2024 collapse of fintech middleman Synapse that froze customer funds.
It is not yet clear whether the rate applies to every balance or comes with minimums and conditions.
Musk has several time endorsed, supported meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, and many users expected X's payments to support it.
For better context, Musk has been a direct supporter for Dogecoin for years. Tesla and his Boring Company began accepting it for purchases in 2022. He renamed Twitter "X" in 2023 and briefly changed the site's logo to the Dogecoin dog. The token's price has repeatedly risen on speculation that X payments would use it.
But Musk has never committed crypto to X's payments.
In a December 2023 interview with ARK Invest's Cathie Wood, he said payments were coming to X but added that he does not "spend a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrency." Internal X Payments documents reported in 2024 showed crypto was not part of the initial product, and X has not confirmed any integration. Dogecoin still rose on payments speculation after a Musk post in late 2024.
X Money launched as a fiat-only product. The company has said broader asset support could come in later phases, and analysts estimate a 60% to 70% chance Dogecoin is added within two years. Nothing has been confirmed.
