Now Elon Musk wants to take over your emails

There seems to be no boundary to Elon Musk’s ambition, with the SpaceX and Tesla founder now turning his attention to something closer to home – email.

There have been a couple of mentions of an email or messaging service to run alongside X (formerly Twitter), with a quick confirmation dropped by Musk in early-2024.

But, with plenty of other things to occupy Elon Musk’s time – like the launch of various space rockets, cleaning up US government spending, sorting out full self-driving on Tesla cars, and launching an AI service – we can perhaps forgive the lack of action on the next-gen email front.

Now though, new talk about the potential Gmail challenger has surfaced (via AndroidHeadlines), once again spurred on my comments on X.

Musk has again confirmed that creating an email service is on his list, before going on to suggest a simpler approach to messaging, saying “that’s exactly what we’re going to do”.

There seems to be plenty of support for the suggestion in the responses on X, but then that’s a captive audience, with several people calling for something to replace Gmail.

Could X mail replace Gmail?

Gmail is the most popular email service, underpinning many personal and business accounts. Appended to your Google account, Gmail is supported across most platforms, where a simple sign-in will have you up connected to your emails in no time at all.

It’s not the most straightforward email client and there’s a lot about Gmail that’s messy. There are also plenty of features that many people likely never use. The call then is for a plain DM approach to email, which is an understandable given an email culture that’s now become complicated.

But, many also see Gmail as a necessity. It’s estimated that there are over 1.8 billion active Gmail users globally and those people are unlikely to abandon their Google account (or just their email accounts) to use a rival service.

While support for X mail will come from X users, it’s impossible to ignore the exodus from X that’s been taking place of late, with many deciding that they’ve had enough of the direction the social network is headed. That’s likely to be reflected in the interest in any X mail service too – regardless of how you feel about Gmail, does your allegiance lie with Elon Musk instead?