Follow up on the Shift4 Theory
Follow up on the Shift4 Theory
Nothing is clear, but let's continue to follow the crumbs
Dear Tesla Twitter family,
This is a follow-up 48h after the “Tesla Shareholders, be the wise guys” article. A couple of events happened, that you should all know about:
Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacson reacted to my post and the subsequent interview by Tesla Herbert with this tweet yesterday
“Connecting the Dots to Disruption” @ConnectingODots did a great thread where he found that although we don’t have direct access to information on the Twitter Payment LLC founded on Feb 1, 2022 in Delaware, there seems to be the same company incorporated again, this time in the State of Washington, on August 17, 2022, and this time there is a clear link to Twitter headquarters, showing names of Twitter employees. So most probably it was not Elon’s initiative.
At the same time a Twitter friend pointed me to two press releases from Shift4, from this spring:
On March 1th, Shift4 announced two acquisitions to expand international payments and cryptocurrency capabilities
On March 15th, Shift4 and The Giving Block announced a $20 Million Cryptocurrency philanthropy campaign
So I am back to Square One. My big question remains, whether the $4bn so far (and maybe more) of Tesla share sales by Elon are for operating expenses at Twitter, or for a one-of event. And my conviction is still the same as Thursday morning, when I published this tweet:
I am happy that I bought my 250 shares of Shift4 ($FOUR), and do still believe they will play a major role in the coming weeks and months. And I have more questions than answers.
Grateful for your attention, have a good weekend,
Alexandra
Loving the work your doing! I've been invested with Shift4 for a couple yrs now. I thought the same pertaining to 🍞 crumbs. That said, I don't think Shift4 will sell anytime soon as it's Mr. Issacman baby. I originally thought Space X would buy it for Starlink (still possible). I would love to see Twitter step up to buy it & it would make a great contribution to Elon's long term goals. Now I see it more that a longterm partnership that will happen between Shift4 & Twitter. Mr. Issacman needs a way to pay for rides on Space X Vehicles & the amazing work he does.
🤘😎🤘 Keep on looking for those 🍞 crumbs.
I was going to comment on your first article but time got the better of me.
Fundamentally, you have confused a payments gateway with a payments processor. Shift4 is primarily a payments processor, whereas Twitter wants to be a payment gateway. It does get confusing as the two terms are used quite loosely but a payments gateway exchanges money from one from one party to another whereas a payments processor collects money on behalf of another party. In the card payments (PCI) world we call these service providers and merchants respectively.
Shift4 is a payments processor (service provider) for merchants - effectively their service is provided transparently. For example, as a Starlink customer, all my payments are processed by Shift4. https://www.shift4.com/new-markets
Shift4 are also an investor in SpaceX: “the investment in SpaceX of $27.5 million in the nine months ended September 30, 2021” Source Page 42 of the latest 10Q report: https://investors.shift4.com/financials/sec-filings/sec-filings-details/default.aspx?FilingId=16184758
PayPal, for example, is a Payments Gateway as are banks.
It would make NO sense for Twitter to purchase Shift4.
It would be cheaper for Twitter to build it own payment gateway or integrate with another e.g. Fireblocks https://www.fireblocks.com/#
BTW, while my thoughts are on Twitter, I don’t know why Elon doesn’t use this service to verify Twitter accounts as part of the Twitter Blue service. The service is called Veriff https://www.veriff.com and Trustpilot use them.