In news that covers social media, trading and cryptocurrencies, Elon Musk’s Twitter has partnered with the popular eToro retail trading platform. This integration will allow Twitter users to view market charts through the social media app, via an already-existing connection with the TradingView API, and then to click through to eToro, where stocks and cryptocurrencies can be bought and sold.
To anyone who follows the overlapping Twitter communities known as fintwit and CT (meaning financial Twitter and crypto Twitter, respectively), the eToro integration will make perfect sense. Twitter has become an arena in which finance and crypto information is circulated first and fastest, and where market sentiment can be both gauged and, in the case of some large accounts, influenced.
With regard to social media and retail trading, eToro told Finance Magnates that: “Twitter has become a crucial part of the retail investing community – it’s where millions of ordinary investors go every day to access financial news, share knowledge and converse.”
Chart from Vanda Research
Elon Musk
During last year’s FTX collapse, crypto Twitter proved itself to be adept at investigative work and direct, real-time analysis, tearing into the details of what was occurring around FTX, Alameda Research, and the main protagonists (Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison) often before the mainstream press got to grips with the issues involved.
And, when it comes to Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, it appears that a tie-in with eToro matches up with his long-term plans for the social media platform, as during the Morgan Stanley conference on March 7th, Musk stated of Twitter: “I think it’s possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world, just by providing people with convenient payment options.”
As for whether Twitter would be earning income from the business it sends eToro’s way, the trading platform was currently unable to disclose commercial details of the deal.
Long-Held Intent
David Sacks
Let’s rewind for a moment to the early days of Elon Musk’s career, when, back in 1999, he founded X.com. This was an FDIC-insured online bank, which subsequently merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity Inc, and the new entity became PayPal (which was already being operated by Confinity), with PayPal later acquired, in 2002, by Ebay.
David Sacks, the former COO of PayPal, once explained that X.com and Confinity merged “to consolidate the fledgling market…
