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When it rains, it pours. This is exactly how one can describe Elon Musk’s management style, punctuated by a Pitbull-like dogged pursuit of stated goals, come what may. In recent days, the world’s richest person has taken major steps toward transforming Twitter into an “everything app” in the pattern of Tencent’s WeChat.

I tell my students that Han Solo, that lovable rogue, would pick Nevada. We offer reduced governance costs through expansive statutory liability shields.

It’s a trade off though. Broad liability shields mean narrow options for investors to hold directors accountable. https://t.co/y9tx4DeRjh

— Ben Edwards (@BenPEdwards) April 11, 2023

First, revealed via a court filing in early April, it emerged that Twitter has now been merged with Elon Musk’s shell company, X Corp. As we had noted at the time, the fact that X Corp. is registered in Nevada instead of Delaware – the seat of three other shell companies that Musk had registered last year – is quite significant, given Nevada’s “expansive statutory liability shields.” Of course, the fact that the Delaware Court of Chancery would not have a natural jurisdiction in Nevada could only have been a plus point in Elon Musk’s book after the drama that ensued last year as the CEO of Tesla tried to wriggle out of a legally binding agreement to acquire Twitter at $54.20 per share.

Then came reports that Elon Musk had purchased 10,000 GPUs and poached talent from DeepMind – a subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet – to run a new AI project that involves a Large Language Model (LLM). Given Musk’s penchant for vertical integration, we believe that the project has the potential to reduce Twitter’s reliance on Google Cloud’s AI-training Platform (GCP) and drive an ever-greater number of data-related exigencies in-house.

This brings us to the core of today’s topic. Twitter has now entered into a game-changing partnership with the brokerage firm eToro. Under the envisaged terms, Twitter users would soon be able to view “real-time prices for a far wider range of stocks, crypto and other assets when using the new $Cashtags feature.” Moreover, $Cashtag searches within Twitter will now yield an expanded repository of pertinent live charts. Bear in mind that Twitter already offers live charts for a limited number of instruments in partnership with TradingView. However, the partnership with eToro will significantly enhance this functionality’s coverage of instruments.

Crucially, by clicking on a particular $Cashtag, users would be redirected to the eToro platform to place live trades.

This is a major enhancement of Twitter’s finance-related amenities and places the global town square one step closer to Elon Musk’s vision of an all-encompassing app.

For those who might be unaware, Elon Musk revealed in a Twitter Space meetup hosted by BBC yesterday that Twitter was “roughly breakeven” right now and that the company just might become cash flow positive in the current quarter. Of course, the company has slashed its headcount by 81 percent relative to its strength back in October 2022. The company now retains a threadbare headcount of just around 1,500 employees vs. the 7,800 workers that were on its payroll back in October. Moreover, in what constitutes another piece of good news, Musk noted that almost all of the advertisers that had boycotted the social media platform in the early days of his takeover have since then returned.