X

X is the social platform Elon Musk built out of Twitter: a single app to post, message, watch video, and, more and more, handle money and talk to an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant. Elon bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion and renamed it X in July 2023, reviving the name and the mission of an idea he started a quarter-century earlier.

What is X?

X is a WeChat-style super app still being built, using the audience of the old Twitter as its base. The plan is for one login to carry your social feed, your chats, and your wallet. The name is not new. It brings back X.com, the online bank Elon founded in 1999 that merged with Confinity to become PayPal. The social network is the front door, and payments, messaging, and AI are the rooms being added behind it.

Why X Exists

The everything-app idea is the older half of the story. Elon has long argued that Western users juggle a dozen apps for jobs one app could handle, and that whoever solves this would sit at the center of digital life. Twitter, with its live audience and verified identities, was the way in: a crowd that already existed to build the rest around. The bank Elon started in 1999 is the app he is trying to finish in 2026, and the social network is the foundation he laid first.

How it Works

The business runs on three subscription tiers. Basic, Premium, and Premium+ climb from a few dollars a month up to ad-free access with the highest limits on Grok, the AI assistant built into the feed. That ladder is the whole money idea in small: the more subscribers you have, and the higher the tier they pay for, the more steady revenue you collect, a stream meant to replace advertising that leans on no single big spender.

Above the subscriptions sits the rest of the stack. Grok, built by Elon's AI company xAI, launched in November 2023 and now ranks the feed and answers questions inside the app. XChat adds one unified system for end-to-end-encrypted messaging, meaning only the sender and the person receiving it can read the message, and it folds in file transfer and calls too. X Money, a Visa-backed digital wallet, lets you link a debit card and send money straight to another person without leaving the app. Building a wallet meant getting past regulators one state at a time, starting with Pennsylvania in August 2023. X has since won money-transmitter licenses in at least 38 states, though it pulled its New York application.

The Economics of X

Advertising, the old engine, fell sharply after the 2022 takeover as marketers paused their spending. Subscriptions now run at about $1 billion a year, driven by Premium and Grok access. The corporate wrapper changed in March 2025, when xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued X at $33 billion, below the $44 billion paid in 2022, and xAI at $80 billion, a combined company of roughly $113 billion, both now under a holding company called X.AI Holdings Corp. The social network and the AI lab now share one balance sheet, and the data from the first feeds the models of the second.

Current Status of X

The reach behind the everything app is large. Elon cites roughly 600 million monthly active users, with daily users in the hundreds of millions, though X is private and no audited figure exists. Full-year 2025 revenue is projected near $2.9 billion, about 10 percent more than 2024 and the first growth since the takeover. The everything-app stack is live in pieces: social plus Grok plus XChat plus an X Money wallet that is still in closed beta. What is missing is depth, not the parts.

What Comes Next

The roadmap points at the parts that are still thin. X Money is the piece most likely to change the math, because payments earn money on every transaction in a way pure social media never did, and a wallet sitting inside a feed of hundreds of millions of people is a head start few fintech companies can match. Deeper Grok integration, a planned video hub, and a wider wallet rollout are the announced direction, and each one is an attempt to earn more per user without piling on more ads. Advertising alone left X at the mercy of one revenue source and the mood of its buyers. Subscriptions, payments, and AI are three separate streams with three different profit profiles, and stacking them is how a platform built on attention tries to become a platform built on habit.

The Bottom Line

X is the rare product trying to become its own old idea: a 1999 internet bank reborn as a 2026 super app with a social network bolted to the front. Whether the everything app arrives or X stays a very loud town square, Elon has bet $44 billion and a merger that it can be more than the sum of its posts.

Related

Keep reading: X Money, Colossus 1. Zoom out to the SpaceXAI overview, or open the Quote Library.