Elon Musk’s X Money exits beta with 6 percent yield offer

Elon Musk has been talking about turning X into a financial platform for years. This week, it stopped being just talk.

X Money, the long-gestating payments feature embedded inside Musk’s social media platform, has entered limited external beta testing, with early screenshots revealing a consumer product that looks more like a polished fintech app than a side experiment.

Users in the beta can earn a 6 percent annual percentage yield on deposits, receive cashback on card purchases and access a metal debit card issued through a partnership with Visa. Deposits are held at Cross River Bank, an FDIC-insured institution, with coverage up to $250,000 per account.

The beta rollout is unconventional, as most things connected to Musk tend to be. Access was distributed through actor William Shatner, best known as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, who auctioned off beta invitations at $1,000 each, with proceeds going to his charity supporting children and veterans. Musk had initially sent Shatner $42 through the app to test its basic functions. A second round of 166 additional invites followed after the first tranche sold out. Each winner also received a $25 welcome gift card from X.

Musk confirmed last month during an internal xAI presentation that X Money had been running in closed beta among company employees since at least May 2025, and that an external rollout was the next step before a full global launch targeted for later in 2026. He described the product in terms that left little room for understatement: “the central source of all monetary transactions” and “really going to be a game-changer.”

The vision behind X Money is not subtle. Musk has long pointed to China’s WeChat, a super app that folds messaging, payments, commerce and services into a single platform, as the model he wants to replicate for a Western audience. X Money is the financial engine of that ambition, and the external beta is the first real public test of whether the product holds up outside a controlled environment.

X has been laying the regulatory groundwork for years, securing money transmitter licenses in more than 40 U.S. states and registering with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The Visa partnership, announced in early 2025, gives X the infrastructure to allow its roughly 600 million monthly active users to fund their accounts and spend through the platform’s card.

X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, separately announced in February that stock and cryptocurrency trading would arrive through what the company is calling Smart Cashtags, allowing users to trade directly from their timelines without leaving the app. X will not act as a broker itself but will connect to execution partners.

Notably absent from the current beta is any cryptocurrency functionality, despite Musk’s long and vocal enthusiasm for Dogecoin. The initial product is firmly focused on fiat currency, suggesting Musk is prioritising regulatory clarity and mainstream usability before introducing digital asset features.

Whether X Money can compete with entrenched players like Venmo, PayPal and Cash App remains to be seen. But Musk has a 600-million-user audience and a track record of forcing conversations in categories where others assumed the market was already settled.

Tags: Elon Musk, X Money, X Corp, digital payments, fintech