Entering the global financial system: Musk X owns half of Worldcoin and wants all

July 24, 2023 is destined to be a day that will be remembered in history. Twitter's iconic "blue bird" logo will soon be replaced by an "X" pattern by Elon Musk, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will announce the official launch of the Worldcoin project.

Coincidentally, both Musk and Sam Altman have set their sights on the current global financial system. Musk was a little "modest" in suggesting that the payment integration "X" may become half of the global financial system, while Sam Altman set his ambition to build a decentralized world-class digital financial system as early as when he created Worldcoin.

As business tycoons and legendary figures, both have made revolutionary innovations in the fields of new energy vehicles and AI. The two had fought side by side before, and now they have parted ways and reunited again, but this time they have gone from partners to opponents on the same battlefield. Who will have the last laugh?

1. The financial ambitions of business leaders

On July 23, Musk tweeted that Twitter would bid farewell to the previous "blue bird" image and replace it with an X logo. This statement shocked the world. However, what was even more unexpected was that the new logo was selected within just one day, and Twitter's "blue bird" was about to retire.

On July 24, the Twitter URL was replaced with X.com, and Musk also officially changed his personal Twitter account avatar to the "X" logo.

In response to this somewhat hasty move, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino posted that the new "X" will have "infinite interactivity", support multiple media formats, and have banking and payment functions.

Musk's remarks in a subsequent interview also implicitly echoed this business plan. He said that users can send and receive funds through Twitter's X. If all goes well, payment integration X may occupy half of the global financial system.

Musk revealed that X is committed to creating the most efficient database for global money, aiming to create financial products with features such as minimized fraud, real-time processing, and seamless integration.

Almost on the same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the Worldcoin project, which he had been building for three years, was officially launched. At the same time, the Worldcoin protocol was officially launched after migrating to the OP (formerly Optimism) mainnet.

Before this news was officially announced, crypto trading platforms including Binance, OKX, Huobi and others had already opened Worldcoin (WLD) recharge channels.

Golden Finance Note: The total amount of Worldcoin (WLD) is 10 billion. The WLD-ERC20 contract address is: 0x163f8c2467924be0ae7b5347228cabf260318753; the WLD-Optimism contract address is: 0xdc6ff44d5d932cbd77b52e5612ba0529dc6226f1.

Sam Altman said in an open letter released by the Worldcoin project that we believe Worldcoin can significantly increase economic opportunity and ultimately demonstrate a potential path to an AI-funded global basic income UBI.

The founder's global business plan does not stop at the surface, but is expanding bit by bit.

On July 14 alone, the number of registered users of World ID exceeded 2 million, and an average of more than 40,000 people registered for World ID certification every week. The verification location of the Worldcoin iris recognition device The Orb was chosen in Hong Kong, which is densely populated and relatively open to the encryption field.

2. Getting out of financial difficulties: for yourself or for others?

Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman once had the beautiful and lofty ideal of using technology to benefit mankind, but as times change, their original intentions have changed.

In 2015, Sam and Musk co-founded the artificial intelligence company OpenAI. The two's initial goal was to build a non-profit, human-friendly artificial intelligence (AI) and then release its source code to the world for sharing and benefiting mankind.

But in 2018, Musk withdrew from OpenAI. The company claimed at the time that the reason was to avoid any conflict of interest with Tesla, because Tesla was developing its own artificial intelligence technology for autonomous driving systems at the time, which would compete with OpenAI for talent. But there are also reports that the real reason for Musk's departure may be the failure of an internal power grab.

In March 2019, Sam resigned from Y Combinator and began to devote himself to the development of OpenAI. In May 2019, under Sam's leadership, OpenAI transformed from a non-profit business to a for-profit company.

In February of this year, with the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI became extremely popular, making AI a focus of discussion that could potentially revolutionize all walks of life.

Last October, after Musk spent $44 billion to officially buy Twitter, he began a series of drastic reform measures. However, the results were not satisfactory, especially the multiple positions he held failed to help the billionaire alleviate his urgent financial needs.

1. Tesla loses money, SpaceX launch fails

In February this year, Musk told the media that Tesla's new factories in Berlin, Germany and Texas have been put into production one after another, but due to low production capacity, they have lost billions of dollars. In terms of investment, Tesla sold a large amount of Bitcoin in 2022 and suffered an impairment loss of US$204 million.

In April this year, SpaceX's launch failed, which made the $3 billion investment of Ma go down the drain.

2. Social media competitors are coming in full force

On July 6, less than a week after Threads, a social software launched by Zuckerberg, went online, its registered users exceeded 100 million. This put Musk under great pressure and he had to publish a statement accusing its new feature of plagiarizing Twitter.

3. Payment business

Musk co-founded online bank X.com in 1999, which merged with Confinity to form PayPal in 2000.

In 2002, EBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, which also provided the greatest confidence for Ma to act as he pleased in the future.

Now that social media Twitter has become the payment-integrated X, Musk is obviously more confident. Especially on July 15, Musk personally admitted that Twitter's advertising revenue had fallen by 50% and the company was heavily in debt.

On the other hand, the life trajectory of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is quite different. The metaverse failed to arrive as promised, but Sam's spring is extremely bright.

In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI. In January of this year, Microsoft announced again that it would invest billions of dollars in OpenAI. Although no specific details were released, Microsoft's investment is believed to be around $10 billion. In addition, ChatGPT is also integrated into the Bing search engine.

With the explosive popularity of ChatGPT, the founder made a fortune.

With abundant cash flow, Sam thought of helping the world.

As early as 2019, when Sam came into contact with a large number of top encryption projects at YC, he realized that the future development of mankind requires the exchange of global digital identities, so the idea of ​​Worldcoin was born.

The project aims to use iris scanning technology (Orb) as a global identification mechanism to lower the barrier to entry into the crypto industry and make crypto assets easily accessible to people around the world.

Today, the Worldcoin project has sufficient funds to grow and develop, and Sam Altman has also begun his vision of building the world's largest and fair digital identity and digital asset system to implement the "universal basic income" social experiment.

In the economic system of the future artificial intelligence era, people will not need to work. They only need to have a World App in hand and click to receive money to meet their basic needs, ultimately achieving the goal of "billions of people out of poverty."

On the other hand, Sam Altman also hopes to achieve universal basic income through Worldcoin’s core business model, which is to collect data, in order to offset the unemployment losses caused by artificial intelligence.

Conclusion

The outside world has mixed opinions on Musk and Sam Altman's official announcement on almost the same day. Some people think Musk will destroy Twitter's accumulated users over the past decade, while others think that X's integration of social media into the payment and financial system will be more conducive to the process of global economic integration. As for Worldcoin, in addition to the common doubts that have been raised, some people say that if the project succeeds, it will introduce more people to the crypto field, which will be more conducive to the development of the crypto ecosystem.

In fact, any viewpoint is normal. Tesla has been full of doubts along the way. Only collision and communication can produce new sparks. Let's wait and see.