X

X is the social platform Elon Musk built out of Twitter: one 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 super app in the style of WeChat, the Chinese app that combines messaging and payments, 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 be 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.

How it Works

Advertising still brings in most of the money, and three subscription tiers add the rest. Basic, Premium, and Premium+ climb from $3 a month up to ad-free access with the highest limits on Grok, the AI assistant built into the feed, and SpaceX's May 2026 filing for its initial public offering (IPO), called an S-1, counted about 4.4 million paying Premium and Premium+ subscribers.

Above the subscriptions is 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 New Hampshire in June 2023. By October 2026, X held money-transmitter licenses in 47 states and Washington, DC, New York included.

The Economics of X

The S-1 put X's 2025 advertising sales at about $1.8 billion. The corporate wrapper changed twice. In March 2025 xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued X at $33 billion and xAI at $80 billion. On February 2, 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, and X with it, so the social network, the AI lab, and the rocket company now share one balance sheet, public since June 2026, and posts on X feed the Grok models.

Current Status of X

xAI's January 6, 2026 funding announcement put monthly users across X and Grok at about 600 million. SpaceX's S-1, filed May 20, 2026, gave the first count in a regulatory filing since 2022: about 550 million monthly users across X and Grok on March 31, 2026, about 117 million of whom used Grok's AI features. The everything-app stack is live in pieces: the social feed, Grok, XChat, and an X Money wallet that opened to verified U.S. users in summer 2026.

What Comes Next

The roadmap points at the newest parts of the app. 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 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. Subscriptions, payments, and AI add three separate streams beside advertising, each with its own profit profile.

The Bottom Line

X is trying to become Elon's own old idea, the 1999 internet bank X.com, rebuilt as a super app with a social network at the front. Since February 2026 that effort has run inside SpaceX, alongside Grok and the rockets.