Elon Musk Outlines X’s Progress and Future Plans

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Elon Musk has shared some insights into growth projections for the X app, as well as how X is currently performing, as part of a broader all-hands meeting of the new, combined xAI and SpaceX group.

Following the departures of several xAI executives, Musk sought to reassure staff of his future direction, by outlining his evolving plans to build a base on the moon, develop xAI, and more.

And within that, we also got some notes on X specifically, which point to how the platform is performing, and what kind of usage X is currently seeing.

First off, X’s head of product Nikita Bier said that X has now hit a $1 billion annual run rate for X subscriptions.

X Premium has been a major point of contention, with Musk hoping, initially, to get the majority of X’s users to pay for the app, as a means to both generate additional revenue (reducing reliance on advertisers) and deter spammers, by making account creation cost-prohibitive.

But thus far, X Premium hasn’t seemingly caught on in a major way, with reports suggesting that only around 1% of X’s user base are paying for the app, though earlier this year, external data did suggest that there had been an uptick in X subscriptions, driven by interest in its Grok AI tools.

And now, X claims that it’s now reached $1 billion in annual revenue from subscriptions.

I mean, that’s still a long way off what the platform generates from ads, but for comparison, Snapchat recently reported that it earned $750 million from Snapchat+ subscriptions in 2025. So X reaching $1 billion is within the realm of what could be expected, with expanding interest in Grok helping to drive more interest in its paid options.

Musk also gave a strange overview of how X actually has one billion users, or will have soon, or something.

As per Musk: "The reason we say 1 billion users is that while our monthly users are, on average, around 600 million, the number of people who have the X app installed is well over a billion, it's just that most people only occasionally come to the X app when there's some major world event. But as we give people more reasons to use the X app, whether it's for communications, for Grok or for X money, whatever the case may be, we want it to be such that, if you wanted to, you could live your life on the X app, and as we make it more and more useful, we'll obviously give people compelling reasons to use the app every day, and my expectation is well over a billion daily active users."

So, X doesn’t have a billion users now, but it has a passive usage of over a billion, and it will have a billion actives sometime soon.

Though even the user count quoted here is in contention, because earlier in the week, Bier noted that he serves as customer support for 500 million people.

So, X has 500 million or 600 million active users, but actually, a billion people could use the app if it was better. So Musk is claiming a billion users, or saying that this is the aim.

Either way, there’s something about a billion users here.

X also claims that January saw a major spike in overall engagement, while February will beat that again, while first-time downloads are also up 50%.

And in terms of what people are doing in the app, X says that the amount of long-form articles published on X has jumped 10x, with reading of long-form posts in the app up 17x.

Though when you offer a $1 million prize for the most popular article in the app, that will tend to drive a lot more interest.

Finally, Musk also discussed the development of X Money, which he hopes will be the next big evolution for the app.

Musk’s dream is to create an all-in-one platform, in which users can engage, shop, pay bills, etc., all in a single app, as Chinese users do on WeChat, but thus far, Musk’s hopes for even simple money transfers in-stream have been dashed by regulatory approvals, which X has been struggling to obtain in some U.S. states.

Musk initially said that it would “blow my mind” if X didn’t have funds transfers up and running on X by the end of 2024, but more than a year on, we’re still yet to see anything on this front.

Though Musk says that it is coming.

Musk says that X Money is already operating internally, with expectations of a public launch within the next two months.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be betting too much on that happening, and Musk does have a long history of overly optimistic projections. But as it stands right now, X does not have a money transmitter license in New York, a key state for its plans, and without that, and approval in several other U.S. states, I’m not sure that we’re going to be seeing X Money in 2025.

But Musk says that it’s coming, probably by April. So we’ll see.

X didn’t offer insight into its ad business, so we don’t have full insight into the performance of the app, but these notes do provide some additional context as to how the X project is evolving, as Musk and Co. look for ways to make it a more valuable, engaging platform.

And it also forms a key part of X’s AI plans, with X data feeding into the xAI system. So it is a crucial puzzle piece for Musk’s broader plans, and it’ll be interesting to see if and how X can get more of its audience back in 2026.