Elon Musk helped write the law governing his own payment app, dismantled the regulator that would police it, and is now launching a stablecoin. Senator Warren has some questions.

Elon Musk helped write the law governing his own payment app, dismantled the regulator that would police it, and is now launching a stablecoin. Senator Warren has some questions.

So X Money is apparently launching this month and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Elon Musk this week that reads like someone who has been watching a very slow motion car crash and finally decided to write it down.

The key details are genuinely remarkable when you put them in the same sentence. Musk was a senior adviser to the president while the GENIUS Act was being written.

The GENIUS Act contains a specific carveout allowing private companies like X to issue stablecoins without the guardrails that apply to similarly situated public companies. The CFPB, which would normally have jurisdiction over a payments product like X Money, was effectively dismantled by Musk working with the acting director Vought ( Isn’t that the name of the company from The Boys??) around the same time.

X Money is now launching with a potential stablecoin, a rumored 6% APY on deposits, no FDIC insurance, and a banking partner that has had enforcement actions from the FDIC twice in the last eight years.

Warren wants answers by today.

The thing that’s actually interesting about this beyond the obvious conflict of interest stuff is that the entire problem Warren is describing is a problem of who controls the rules. When one person can simultaneously shape the legislation, remove the enforcement mechanism, and then launch the product the legislation was supposed to govern, you have a system where the rules exist entirely at the discretion of the entity being regulated.

Which is a solved problem architecturally. Like it’s genuinely funny that we keep building payment infrastructure this way when the technology to make the protocol enforce the rules instead of the company exists and works. If only there was a way to do that. Wild that nobody has thought of it/s