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Elon Musk is still frantically pushing to launch X payment services in the US by the end of 2024, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Launching payment services is arguably one of the reasons why Musk paid so much to acquire Twitter in 2022. His rebranding of the social platform into X revives a former dream he had as a PayPal co-founder who fought and failed to name the now-ubiquitous payments app X. Musk has told X staff that transforming the company into a payments provider would be critical to achieving his goal of turning X into a so-called everything app "within three to five years."

Late last year, Musk said it would "blow" his "mind" if X didn't roll out payments by the end of 2024, so Bloomberg's report likely comes as no big surprise to Musk's biggest fans who believe in his vision. At that time, Musk said he wanted X users' "entire financial lives" on the platform before 2024 ended, and a Bloomberg review of "more than 350 pages of documents and emails related to money transmitter licenses that X Payments submitted in 11 states" shows approximately how close he is to making that dream a reality on his platform.

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Elon Musk's X Corp. is reportedly demanding money from at least six Australians who were laid off, saying the company accidentally overpaid them. The Sydney Morning Herald reported today that "X is threatening to take some former Australian employees to court, demanding they return entitlements it claims were overpaid to them after it bungled the currency conversion from US to Australian dollars on the payments."

Emails sent this year by X's Asia Pacific human resources department to the laid-off employees said there was "a significant overpayment in error in January 2023." The alleged overpayments ranged from $1,500 to $70,000 for each employee.

So far, none of the former employees have repaid the money, The Sydney Morning Herald was told. One Australian dollar is currently worth $0.67 in US currency.

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Australia's safety regulator has ended a legal battle with X (formerly Twitter) after threatening approximately $500,000 daily fines for failing to remove 65 instances of a religiously motivated stabbing video from X globally.

Enforcing Australia's Online Safety Act, eSafety commissioner Julie Inman-Grant had argued it would be dangerous for the videos to keep spreading on X, potentially inciting other acts of terror in Australia.

But X owner Elon Musk refused to comply with the global takedown order, arguing that it would be "unlawful and dangerous" to allow one country to control the global Internet. And Musk was not alone in this fight. The legal director of a nonprofit digital rights group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Corynne McSherry, backed up Musk, urging the court to agree that "no single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire Internet."