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Elon Musk’s X announces “first of many” big updates about X Money this year

Credit: Linda Yaccarino/X

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Elon Musk seems to be diving back to his roots this year, with his social media platform, X, reportedly looking to launch its X Money service in Q1 2025.

Before he became the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk made his fortune in X.com, an online bank that eventually became PayPal. Musk’s earnings from PayPal’s sale would create the fortune he would later use to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla.

X CEO announcement: 

  • As per a post by X CEO Linda Yaccarino, X has secured a deal with Visa, the United States’ largest credit card network, to launch X Money.
  • As per the X CEO, X Money would provide secure and instant funding of users “X Wallets” through Visa Direct.
  • X Money would connect to users’ debit cards, allowing peer-to-peer payments similar to Venmo.
  • X Money would also provide users with the option to transfer funds to their bank accounts instantly.
  • Yaccarino also emphasized that the Visa deal is only the “first of many big announcements” about X Money this 2025.

Why it matters: 

  • This move signifies the first concrete action by X to establish a financial ecosystem on the social media platform.
  • This aligns with Elon Musk’s vision to turn X into an “everything app.” 
  • Even before acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, Musk has openly discussed the idea of creating a super app of sorts, similar to China’s WeChat. 
  • Musk has previously stated that X users should be able to conduct their “entire financial world” on the platform.

X Money details:

  • X Money is expected to roll out in the first quarter, and more financial partnerships are likely to be announced later, CNBC noted, citing a person reportedly familiar with the matter.
  • CNBC‘s source claimed that one of the first use cases for X Money would be creators on the X platform.
  • With X Money, X creators would be able to accept payments and manage their funds without the need for external banking services.
  • Visa, for its part, has not issued a comment on the matter.

Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s X will start using a Tesla-like software update strategy

The initiative seems designed to accelerate updates to the social media platform, while maintaining maximum transparency.

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Ministério Das Comunicações, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Elon Musk’s social media platform X will adopt a Tesla-esque approach to software updates for its algorithm.

The initiative seems designed to accelerate updates to the social media platform, while maintaining maximum transparency.

X’s updates to its updates

As per Musk in a post on X, the social media company will be making a new algorithm to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users. These updates would then be repeated every four weeks. 

“We will make the new 𝕏 algorithm, including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users, open source in 7 days. This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed,” Musk wrote in his post.

The initiative somewhat mirrors Tesla’s over-the-air update model, where vehicle software is regularly refined and pushed to users with detailed release notes. This should allow users to better understand the details of X’s every update and foster a healthy feedback loop for the social media platform.

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xAI and X

X, formerly Twitter, has been acquired by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI last year. Since then, xAI has seen a rapid rise in valuation. Following the company’s the company’s upsized $20 billion Series E funding round, estimates now suggest that xAI is worth tens about $230 to $235 billion. That’s several times larger than Tesla when Elon Musk received his controversial 2018 CEO Performance Award. 

As per xAI, the Series E funding round attracted a diverse group of investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group, among others. Strategic partners NVIDIA and Cisco Investments also continued support for building the world’s largest GPU clusters.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s xAI bets $20B on Mississippi with 2GW AI data center project

The project is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs, dramatically expand xAI’s computing capacity, and further cement the Mid-South as a growing hub for AI infrastructure.

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Credit: Governor Tate Reeves/X

Elon Musk’s xAI plans to pour more than $20 billion into a massive new data center campus in Southaven, Mississippi, marking the largest single economic development project in the state’s history. 

The project is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs, dramatically expand xAI’s computing capacity, and further cement the Mid-South as a growing hub for AI infrastructure.

xAI goes MACROHARDRR in Mississippi

xAI has acquired and is retrofitting an existing facility in Southaven to serve as a new data center, which will be known as “MACROHARDRR.” The site sits near a recently acquired power plant and close to one of xAI’s existing data centers in Tennessee, creating a regional cluster designed to support large-scale AI training and inference. 

Once completed, the Southaven facility is expected to push the company’s total computing capacity to nearly 2 GW, placing it among the most powerful AI compute installations globally. The data center is scheduled to begin operations in February 2026.

Gov. Tate Reeves shared his optimism about the project in a press release. “This record-shattering $20 billion investment is an amazing start to what is sure to be another incredible year for economic development in Mississippi. Today, Elon Musk is bringing xAI to DeSoto County, a project that will transform the region and bring amazing opportunities to its residents for generations. This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history,” he said. 

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xAI’s broader AI ambitions

To secure the investment, the Mississippi Development Authority approved xAI for its Data Center Incentive program, which provides sales and use tax exemptions on eligible computing hardware and software. The City of Southaven and DeSoto County are also supporting the project through fee-in-lieu agreements aimed at accelerating development timelines and reducing upfront costs.

Founded in 2023 by Elon Musk, xAI develops advanced artificial intelligence systems focused on large-scale reasoning and generative applications. Its flagship product, Grok, is integrated with the social media platform X, alongside a growing suite of APIs for image generation, voice, and autonomous agents, including offerings tailored for government use.

Elon Musk highlighted xAi’s growth and momentum in a comment about the matter. “xAI is scaling at an immeasurable pace — we are building our third massive data center in the greater Memphis area. MACROHARDRR pushes our Colossus training compute to ~2GW – by far the most powerful AI system on Earth. This is insane execution speed by xAI and the state of Mississippi. We are grateful to Governor Reeves for his support of building xAI at warp speed,” Musk said. 

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Tesla AI Head says future FSD feature has already partially shipped

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, says that something that was expected with version 14.3 of the company’s Full Self-Driving platform has already partially shipped with the current build of version 14.2.

Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have teased on several occasions that reasoning will be a big piece of future Full Self-Driving builds, helping bring forth the “sentient” narrative that the company has pushed for these more advanced FSD versions.

Back in October on the Q3 Earnings Call, Musk said:

“With reasoning, it’s literally going to think about which parking spot to pick. It’ll drop you off at the entrance of the store, then go find a parking spot. It’s going to spot empty spots much better than a human. It’s going to use reasoning to solve things.”

Musk said in the same month:

“By v14.3, your car will feel like it is sentient.”

Amazingly, Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.2.2.2, which is the most recent iteration released, is very close to this sentient feeling. However, there are more things that need to be improved, and logic appears to be in the future plans to help with decision-making in general, alongside other refinements and features.

On Thursday evening, Elluswamy revealed that some of the reasoning features have already been rolled out, confirming that it has been added to navigation route changes during construction, as well as with parking options.

He added that “more and more reasoning will ship in Q1.”

Interestingly, parking improvements were hinted at being added in the initial rollout of v14.2 several months ago. These had not rolled out to vehicles quite yet, as they were listed under the future improvements portion of the release notes, but it appears things have already started to make their way to cars in a limited fashion.

Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.2 – Full Review, the Good and the Bad

As reasoning is more involved in more of the Full Self-Driving suite, it is likely we will see cars make better decisions in terms of routing and navigation, which is a big complaint of many owners (including me).

Additionally, the operation as a whole should be smoother and more comfortable to owners, which is hard to believe considering how good it is already. Nevertheless, there are absolutely improvements that need to be made before Tesla can introduce completely unsupervised FSD.

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