Elon Musk’s Twitter, which the billionaire said this week is now being run by his dog, has closed a partnership deal with the online investing platform eToro, proving that the company might not be as radioactive as some people might think.
The new partnership, which was announced on Thursday, expands Twitter’s $Cashtags feature and lets users search for more real-time prices for stocks, crypto, and other financial assets. Furthermore, users will now have the option to go to the eToro site directly from Twitter and invest in the asset they looked up. According to eToro, the new partnership with Twitter will allow it to “further financial education,” which is a polite way to say, “to make money.”
In a statement, eToro CEO Yoni Assia said that financial content on social media had provided education to many who felt excluded by more traditional channels.
“Twitter has become a crucial part of the retail investing community – it’s where millions of ordinary investors go every day to access financial news, share knowledge and converse,” Assia said. “There is power in shared knowledge and by transforming investing into a group endeavour, we can yield better results and become more successful, together.”
Considering the fervor of retail investors on social media, the partnership could be a potential boom for eToro. Twitter currently sees an average of 4.7 million $Cashtag searches a day, according to information provided in the press release, and has seen 420 million $Cashtag searches since the beginning of the year. $TSLA (Tesla), $SPY (SPDR S&P 500 ETF), and $BTC (Bitcoin) were among the top five most searched $Cashtags on Twitter.
Twitter launched the $Cashtag feature in December and previously linked to live price charts on Robinhood, a move that was met with scepticism from retail investors. The company invoked the wrath of these small investors in January 2021 during the GameStonks saga, where it limited trading of GameStop during the stock’s random and meteoric rise.
Despite intense criticism, Musk said in a surprise BBC interview on Tuesday that Twitter was “roughly breaking even” and that most of its advertisers had returned. The company’s financial health has no doubt been affected by Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting measures, including laying off swaths of people and declining to pay rent to some of Twitter’s landlords. None of that, however, appears to have stopped eToro from going into business with Twitter.
“We could be cash-flow positive this quarter if things go well,” Musk said.