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Forget Mars – Elon Musk’s biggest job could be fixing email

Elon Musk is known for his bold ventures (among other things), but he might have just taken on his biggest challenge yet in fixing email.

The X, Tesla, and SpaceX head honcho has been dropping tips that he’s working on the whole email problem, with a potential Xmail service in the works.

It all emerged, of course, on Musk’s troublesome social network, X (formerly Twitter). Responding to a poster who offered “X Mail would be cool”, Musk replied in signature pithy style: “Yeah. On the list of things to do.”

Musk expanded on this slightly, or rather agreed to someone else inadvertently expanding on the topic. When another X user, who just happens to work for Musk’s AI company, xAI, wrote a post asking for “an email address that goes into a plain txt DM inbox and abstracts the annoying & messy threads/formatting mess that is email”, Musk replied “That’s exactly what we are going to do”.

So, added all together, it seems to imply that Elon Musk has in mind an Xmail service that cuts through the clutter and the formatting nightmare that is email with the kind of interface more in tune with a modern messaging service.

If you’re wondering why Musk would be messing about with janky old email rather than sending rockets to Mars or making swingeing cuts to government spending, it’s worth looking back to the time when it emerged that Musk was looking to buy Twitter.

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It’s long been known that Musk wants to build the Western equivalent of China’s WeChat – a so-called ‘everything app’ that offers text messaging, voice messaging, video conferencing, gaming, location sharing, photo and video sharing and mobile payments on top of its core social network features.

Musk wants X users to do everything through the app, and that would likely include email, where a vast amount of business is still conducted.

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