Tesla CEO Elon Musk seems to have a plan for X: To make it the app for everything. Not only for generating AI images with almost no filtering, but for everything: watching videos, livestreaming, video calling, paying for content… According to his recent statements, Musk has many ideas for the platform, and the latest is to create his own email service.
The real question is whether this future “X Mail” will be able to compete with a titan like Gmail. Let’s break it down.
Where does the idea come from? From a post on X, of course. A user commented that an “X Mail would be cool,” and Musk responded with a modest, “Yeah. On the list of things to do.” Back in February, when an X engineer asked, “When are we making X Mail?” Musk replied, “It’s coming,” so the clues have been there. However, it’s always hard to separate real intentions from the other interactions Musk has on his very active X account.
What will X Mail look like? It’s not known. However, an xAI engineer commented on his profile that he would like to have “an email address that goes into a plain text DM inbox and abstracts the annoying & messy threads/formatting mess that is email.” In other words, it would be a hybrid of X and Gmail’s direct messages. To that post, Musk simply responded, “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
In this X post, Musk confirms his intentions for X Mail in response to an xAI engineer.
Image | Xataka
Why? In his quest to create the app for everything, having an email service to receive important messages, invoices, newsletters, etc., makes sense. However, should X Mail come to fruition, it will have to compete with Microsoft and Google, as well as other established players in the industry, such as Proton. Microsoft has Outlook, and Google has Gmail. Both platforms have millions of users and offer a full ecosystem of products around the email account. X is currently little more than a social media platform.
A question of numbers. X’s user numbers are private, but it’s estimated to have around 588 million monthly active users. Gmail has 1.8 billion users worldwide. Outlook has about 400 million.
If there’s one thing these X users have in common, it’s that all of them—absolutely all of them, excluding bots—already have an email account that they used to sign up. What’s more, chances are that most of them have an Android phone (with at least one Gmail account) or an iPhone (with at least one Google, Outlook, and iCloud account).
Both Google and Microsoft offer a full suite of services associated with their respective accounts, from office automation to search engines, AI services, professional tools, and even YouTube in Google’s case. The real question is: What can X offer to persuade users—who already have a Google, Microsoft, and any other service account—to create an email account on X and, most importantly, use it?
Image | X | Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk (Unsplash)
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