My base scenario behind my worldcoin purchase: Elon and sam altman were kind of friends when they were in OpenAI. They were attending programmes together sometimes, basically elon decided to fund openAI because of him. Also even though sam was in openai team, elon made a tour for sam in SpaceX.
Secondly, Elon tries to fight against bots and ais in x platform. He is now thinking of charging a small amount of fees for liking, sharing etc in x to prevent bots. So if you have a world id, it means you are a verified human. And if you logged in to twitter with your world id, they dont have to charge you. Basically my hope is not sam just Tweets and coin pumps. For project's scalability it still makes sense but my hope (because low chance of happening) is twitter starts to make a deal with worldcoin. For regulatory issues, yeah its risky but they can assure governments about data privacy. For verifications they dont need to store their eye data. Idk i agree about regulatory issues.
Sure, there's going to be nearly universal id system at some point, but i can't see why it would be worldcoin. And yeah, obviously elon would like something like that. But that road ended at the moment he realize he couldn't take over openAI by himself and got kicked out. And after that Elon seemed to sue Altman just out of spite, to have his revenge somehow, even though he has no legal grouds to sue. So, keeping that in mind, even if by some miracle worldcoin would be success, i don't think Elon would want anything to do with that. Most likely he is already looking for alternative.
I however don't believe he could do hostal takeover on that alternative either, as people are aware of his tactics now.
I agree when it saw the news about them, i also get to the same conclusion. Maybe it might be an excuse that i try to confirm myself because i hold but i think that rich geniuses wont hold a grudge. They will still use it if its something valuable part for his plan. For example elon sees Google's deepmind as evil because its not open. He says he funded openai against google. But in x platform you can see "sign up with google". So i think it wont be a problem. But i agree about "why worldcoin" part. He can build something similar himself or get help from another competitor. Also worldcoin is too early rn with 5 million registered people. Maybe it will happen in very long time. Thanks for thoughts btw.