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By now, you've probably heard about Elon Musk's grand plan to turn X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, into an "everything app." One of the major pillars of Musk's reimagining of X includes a payment platform much like PayPal or Venmo.

New documents obtained by Bloomberg shed new light, not only into Musk's financial service vision for X, but also into just how much the company has struggled financially since he acquired it in October 2022.

These new documents are prepared by X and have been submitted to state regulators as Musk's company looks to receive money transmitter licenses — a requirement for anyone looking to provide financial services of this kind. These documents also give the public its first official peek into the company since Musk took X private.

X's revenue has plunged

Now that X is no longer publicly traded, there's a lot we no longer know about the company. Most reports regarding X's revenue troubles, for example, have come from internal leaks.

However, these new documents make it official: According to X, the company's revenue has plummeted since Musk took over.

In the first six months of 2023 — the first full year in which Musk controlled the company — X's revenue fell by nearly 40 percent from the same period the prior year. The company brought in $1.48 billion during that time period. Furthermore, X lost $456 million in the first quarter of 2023.

The majority of this drop in revenue can be attributed to X's advertiser woes. Prior to Musk's takeover, when the platform was known as Twitter, advertising generally accounted for a whopping 90 percent of the company's revenue. Under Musk, advertisers fled due to platform changes and various controversies involving its owner, so ad revenue declined.

Musk's financial services push

X is looking to launch a payment services system on its social media platform. The company submitted documents to 11 states as it seeks to obtain money transmitter licenses.

The company is looking to provide users with a PayPal/Venmo-like feature called X Payments. The plan is to allow users to pay other users, buy products and services, and store money via their X account. 

Musk has floated a number of ideas to make up for the loss of advertising revenue. For example, X rolled out the X Premium subscription plan as well as a subscription service for creators. Neither service has been able to close the revenue gap left by the advertiser exodus. 

However, according to these documents, X plans to utilize the X Payments service mainly in order to achieve “increased participation and engagement” on the social media platform. X Payments does not plan to charge fees for most of its services.

The X Payments idea has been brought up by Musk before. In previous comments, Musk shared that he'd like users to be able to open a savings account with X with “extremely high yield.”

According to Bloomberg, then-Twitter had actually incorporated a payments business in February 2022, before Musk bought the platform. Now called X Payments, the X subsidiary has its own board of directors and management team. While X currently has business relations with payment processors, like Stripe and Adyen, and banks with Citibank, it's unclear if X would be partnering with these companies for X Payments' services.

And, bad news for cryptocurrency advocates. According to the report, X Payments has no current plans to incorporate virtual currencies like crypto into the business.

YouTube videos are getting the Community Notes treatment.

The platform will be experimenting with a community-driven fact-checking feature, announced June 17, and designed to provide "relevant, timely, and easy-to-understand" context to YouTube videos — an apt endeavor as misinformation (and disinformation) proliferates online.

"This could include notes that clarify when a song is meant to be a parody, point out when a new version of a product being reviewed is available, or let viewers know when older footage is mistakenly portrayed as a current event," YouTube explained in a blog post.

SEE ALSO: U.S. Surgeon General: Social media needs a warning label

Early versions of notes will be created by users determined to be in "good-standing" by YouTube, and then rated by third-party evaluators on their helpfulness. This feedback, the platform explains, will help train an in-house bridging-based algorithm that will screen notes in the future.

Viewers will also be asked for feedback on the helpfulness scale, with justification. "For example, whether it cites high-quality sources or is written clearly and neutrally."

Credit: YouTube

X's own Community Notes feature has offered an example of just how (mainly, how not) to approach a community-led fact-checking system. While CEO Elon Musk has alternated between bolstering and waging a war on the feature, a Mashable investigation found that few of the platform's users actually see approved Community Notes addressing misinformation. "Many times, misinformation on X spreads without any Community Note. Or in another common scenario, a Community Note is approved, but then later removed from the post," reported Matt Binder. When a post receives a community note, and it stays attached to the post, Binder wrote, "the falsehood in the post is often viewed around 5 to 10 times more than the fact-check."

Speaking to Poynter about the efficacy of Community Notes at curbing misinformation, former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth said there were "some areas where it’s successful," but also said he saw "many other areas where it is not a robust solution for harm mitigation." MediaWise director Alex Mahadevan was quoted as calling the user rating system "mostly a failure." It's often a site wide vessel for memes.

Still, YouTube is taking a stab at a similar real-time feature, among other efforts to create a more transparent platform. The company has previously rolled out a variety of topic-specific information panels and now requires creators to disclose the use of generative AI when its applied to alterations of real people, real events, or otherwise "realistic" looking scenes.

The notes pilot will only be available in English and to select Creator Studio users in the U.S. during early tests. According to the platform: "We anticipate that there will be mistakes – notes that aren’t a great match for the video, or potentially incorrect information – and that’s part of how we’ll learn from the experiment."

Banana is a game in which players repeatedly click on a banana, and that's about it. Think Cookie Clicker, but instead of all the fun features that the game adds, you just click on the cookie endlessly.

Despite that simplicity, the game has become a massive hit since its launch in April.

SEE ALSO: Nintendo Direct June 2024: 8 big announcements, including 'The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom'

With a peak concurrent player count of over 860,000, Banana is now the second most played game on Steam, trailing behind Counter-Strike 2. This surge in popularity is remarkable, especially considering it had just 100,000 players a week ago. In terms of peak count, Banana even threatens to surpass Baldur's Gate 3, which has a peak count of 875,343 players.

All-time concurrent player peaks according to steamcharts.com Credit: Screenshot / Steam Charts

It seems likely that Banana will soon push BG3 out of Steam's top 10 all-time list.

Why is Banana so popular?

While the game may initially seem dull, there is more to it than meets the eye. Persistent clicking eventually leads to the appearance of another banana, which players can trade or sell on the Steam market. Occasionally, a rare and more valuable banana drops, making the repetitive clicking potentially lucrative. Rare bananas can sell for hundreds of dollars, with the top-priced banana fetching over $1,300.

As the game's developers told Polygon, "I do believe that the reason why it mostly caught on is because it’s a legal ‘infinite money glitch.'"

Subsequently, the game's minimal resource demand on PCs has led to botting issues, with developers telling Polygon that some users are running "up to 1,000 accounts" to maximize rare drop chances. As the game's popularity grows, the developers say they are updating banana designs to manage the rapid influx of players and content.

In short, the virality of Banana can be explained by general tongue-in-cheek internet humor and the stupid amount of money one can make, which turns this boring clicker game into a very weird pseudo-NFT trading card simulator.

Everyone knows sound is a critical component to most films and videos. After all, even when films were silent, there was still a musical accompanist letting the audience know how to feel.

This natural law remains the same for the new crop of generative AI videos, which emerge eerily silent. That's part of why Google has been working on "video-to-audio" technology (V2A) which "makes synchronized audiovisual generation possible." On Monday, Google's AI lab, DeepMind, shared progress on generating such audio including soundtracks and dialogue that automatically match up with AI-generated videos.

Google has been hard at work developing multimodal generative AI technology to compete with rivals. OpenAI has its AI video generator Sora (yet to be publicly released) and GPT-4o, which creates AI voice responses. Companies like Meta and Suno have been exploring AI-generated audio and music, but pairing audio with video is relatively new. ElevenLabs has a similar tool that matches audio to text prompts, but DeepMind says V2A is different because it doesn't require text prompts.

SEE ALSO: Luma AI Dream Machine: What it is, how to try it

V2A can be paired with AI video tools like Google Veo or existing archival footage and silent films. This can be used for soundtracks, sound effects, and even dialogue. It works by using a diffusion model trained with visual inputs, natural language prompts, and video annotations to gradually refine random noise into audio that fits the tone and context of videos.

Google DeepMind says V2A can "understand raw pixels" therefore you don't actually need a text prompt to generate the audio, but it does help with the accuracy. The model can also be prompted to make the tone of the audio sound positive or negative. Along with the announcement, DeepMind released some demo videos, including a video of a dark, creepy hallway accompanied by horror music, a lone cowboy at sunset scored to a mellow harmonica tune, and an animated figure talking about its dinner.

V2A will include Google's SynthID watermarking as a safeguarding measure against misuse, and Deepmind's blog post says the feature is currently undergoing testing before it's released to the public.

SAVE $20: As of June 18, get The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening for just $39.95 at Walmart, down from its usual price of $59.99. That's a discount of 33%.

Opens in a new window Credit: Walmart "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening" $39.99 at Walmart
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During the latest Nintendo Direct, Nintendo revealed a brand new The Legend of Zelda adventure: Echoes of Wisdom. This September, you'll get to play as Princess Zelda for the first time in a mainline Zelda game. That's still a few months away, so what can you do to scratch that adventuring itch until then? Play another Zelda game, of course!

As of June 18, you can get a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on Nintendo Switch for just $39.99 at Walmart. That's $20 off its normal price of $59.99 and a discount of 33%. As of this writing, Amazon still lists the game at $49.90.

SEE ALSO: Nintendo Direct June 2024: 8 big announcements, including 'The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom'

This Switch adventure is a remake of the 1993 Game Boy title of the same name, which marked the first appearance of the Zelda series on a handheld. It follows Link as he wakes up on Koholint Island, worlds away from Hyrule. He must figure out why he's there and how he arrived in the first place while working to wake the legendary Wind Fish. This version gives the game a beautiful visual upgrade with a diorama-like aesthetic, an all-new Chamber Dungeon mode, and a reimagined soundtrack for good measure. It's the original game completely reborn.

Now's a good time to return to this classic while you wait to try out the new game. If you want to explore and earn everything, it should just last you long enough, though it's understandable that it's going to be a tough wait.