Elon Musk has said that Twitter is “definitely” heading in a direction towards facilitating payments on the platform.

The billionaire, who purchased the social media giant for $44 billion last month, recently held a meeting with staff where he revealed plans for the future of the company, including banking services.

A transcript of the meeting, published by US tech publication The Verge, reveals that Musk plans to enable Twitter users to “send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real-time”.

“If you can simply have one balance on Twitter that can simply go positive or a negative, and when it goes positive, the interest rate is better than what you could receive elsewhere, and when it goes negative, the interest rate is lower than what you see elsewhere, now you have a much simpler system,” said the Twitter chief executive.

He added that users could attach a debit card to the Twitter account so there is a “backwards compatibility” into the payments system because “not everyone will accept Twitter”.

“So if have above a certain balance, you automatically send people a debit card," he told staff. "You want backwards compatibility to the existing financial infrastructure."

He continued: "In the U.S., there’s still a small number of cheques that are used. So if your landlord is demanding that you send a cheques, you have to have some non-zero number of cheques. Then we would send a small number of cheques to those that need to have cheques. Then you add automatic payment. Then over time, you basically address what are all the things that you’d want from finance standpoint. And if you address all things that you want from a finance standpoint, then we will be the people’s financial institution."

Following reports earlier this month that 3,700 Twitter staff members will be cut to reduce costs, he also addressed the possibility of bankruptcy.

"We just definitely need to bring in more cash than we spend," said Musk. "If we don’t do that and there’s a massive negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of the question. That is a priority. We can’t scale to one billion users and take massive losses along the way. That’s not feasible. I don’t think we will."

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