Elon Musk told a Morgan Stanley conference last month that he wants Twitter to become "the biggest financial institution in the world."
Budrul Chukrut | soup images | Light Rocket via Getty Images
Twitter will allow its users to access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company.
Starting Thursday, a new feature will roll out to the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell shares and other assets on eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively.
Currently, it is already possible to see real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and stocks of some companies like Tesla. That can be done using Twitter's "cashtags" feature: search for a ticker symbol and insert the dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface). ).
With the eToro partnership, Twitter's cash tags will be expanded to cover many more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC.
You'll also be able to click a button that says "view on eToro," which takes you to the eToro site, and then buy and sell assets on their platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner.
"As we've grown tremendously in the last three years, we've seen more and more users engage on Twitter. [and] educate yourself about the markets," Yoni Assia, CEO of eToro, told CNBC in an interview.
"There is very high-quality content, real-time content about the financial analysis of companies and what is happening around the world. We believe this partnership will allow us to reach these new audiences." [and] better connect the Twitter and eToro brands."
The partnership marks an unusual and noteworthy business deal for Twitter since Elon Musk took the reins as CEO after buying the platform for $44 billion last year.
Founded in Israel in 2007, eToro is an online brokerage that allows users to buy and sell stocks, cryptocurrencies, and index funds.
Among its most popular features is a feature that allows people to mimic the trading strategies of other users. The company has more than 32 million registered users in Europe, Asia and the United States, Assia said.
During Musk's time as CEO, Twitter has slashed staff, cutting its headcount from 8,000 to 1,500 when he took over, in a bid to cut costs and achieve profitability.
His actions have spooked advertisers, with many brands leaving the platform over concerns that their content moderation standards would slip.
On Wednesday, Musk said "almost all" advertisers were back on the app. However, Stellar and volkswagenthat stopped advertising there, said it doesn't plan to resume advertising yet.
Assia said she worked with the same Twitter team on the stock market data tool that she had worked with in previous partnerships with the company.
Assia did not have any direct contact with Musk, he said. However, she joked that having met Warren Buffett and Bernard Arnault, who are among the richest men in the world, a meeting with Musk was inevitable.
โWe are very excited about the intersection of finance and social media,โ Assia told CNBC in an exclusive interview this week.
'fool'
Assia said "Fintwit," or financial twitter, has become a popular trend on the app, which many people use to find breaking news and updates on stocks and other assets. Twitter was a key platform involved in the retail boom in 2021.
Twitter added pricing data for $Cashtags in December 2022. Since the beginning of 2023, there have been more than 420 million searches for Cashtags, with an average of 4.7 million searches per day.
Musk has set out to turn Twitter into a so-called "super app." These apps tend to offer users a range of services like instant messaging, banking, and travel.
The concept has proven very popular in East Asia. In China, Internet giant Tencent offers payments through its WeChat messaging app.
Earlier this week, Musk changed the corporate name of Twitter to X Corp after merging with a shell company of that name, according to a court filehighlighting his ambition to turn the firm into a super app.
Weeks before completing his acquisition of Twitter, which followed multiple attempts to back out of the deal, Musk tweeted that buying the company was an "accelerator to creating X, the app of everything."
โWe are following that story probably like the rest of the Twitter users,โ Assia told CNBC. "So it will be exciting to see Twitter become more financially focused, and we look forward to seeing our partnership expand even beyond this step."
Musk told a Morgan Stanley conference last month that he wants Twitter to become "the biggest financial institution in the world."
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