Elon Musk has a very clear plan for X: make it the app for everything. Not only in the app to generate images with AI without hardly any type of filterbut for everything: watch videos, make direct, talk to people by video call, pay…There are many ideas that the tycoon has for the platform and the latest, according to his recent statements, is to create his own email service.

Another very different thing is that this future “X Mail“can compete against a titan of the stature of Gmail. Let’s go in parts.

Where does this come from. From a tweet post, of course. a user commented on the social network that an “X Mail would be cool”, to which Elon Musk responded with a modest “Yes. It’s on the bucket list.” We’ve known this for a long time, in fact. Back in February, in response to an X engineer who I asked “When will we do XMail?”, Elon Musk replied “It’s coming”, so the clues were there. However, it’s always difficult to differentiate real intentions from all the other interactions Elon Musk has on his very active X account.

What will X Mail be like? We don’t know. However, an xAI engineer commented on his profile that he would love “to have an email address that goes in plain text to an inbox similar to direct messages and abstracts away the annoying and messy threads and formatting that are in emails.” That is, what would be the child of X and Gmail direct messages. To that post, Elon Musk responded with a simple “that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

In this tweet, Elon Musk responds to an xAI engineer confirming his intentions for X Mail | Image: techopiniones

Because? Because in your desire to create your app for everything, having an email service in which to receive important messages, invoices, newsletters, etc., makes sense. However, X Mail, if it is launched, will have to compete against Microsoft and Google, in addition to other established players in the industry such as Proton. Microsoft has Outlook and Google has Gmail. Both platforms have millions of users and offer an entire ecosystem of products around the email account. X, at the moment, is little more than a social network.

A question of numbers. X user numbers are not public, but it is estimated which has 588 million monthly active users. Gmail only has 1.8 billion users around the world, let’s not even talk about Google. Outlook, for its part, has around of 400 million.

If these X users have something in common, it is that everyone, absolutely everyone, without exception (let’s ignore the bots), already has an email account that they used to register. What’s more, the vast majority most likely have an Android phone (ergo, at least a Gmail account) or an iPhone (potentially, with at least one Google, Outlook or iCloud account).

Both Google and Microsoft offer a whole suite of services associated with their respective accounts, from office automation to search engines, through AI services, professional tools and even YouTube in the case of Google. The question is what can X offer so that a user who already has a Google, Microsoft or literally any other service account decides to create an email account in X and, above all, use it.

Cover image | BM Amaro edited by techopiniones

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