So here are some insights from Elon Musk into growth projections for X app and how X has been performing currently. This was necessary after departures of several of its executives and Musk was looking to reassure the staff of their future direction by outlining his plans for building a base on moon, developing xAI and other developments.
He also went on to talk about how X has been performing and what kind of usage X has been seeing. X has now hit a $1 billion annual run rate for X subscriptions. X Premium had been a major bone of contention where Musk was looking for users to pay for the app not just for generating additional revenue and prevent spammers and at the same time make the account creation cost prohibitive.
The figure of $1 billion is still long way off from what the platform has generated from ads. On the other hand, Snapchat generated $750 million from Snapchat+ subscription in 2025, X reaching $1 billion is within the realm of what was expected and with expansion of interest in Grok will help to drive more interest in paid options.
In the words of Musk, the reason for stating that there are 1 billion users is that even though there are around 600 million users using the app but the number of people having X app installed is more than a billion. This is because some people come on the app when only there is a major world event. Now it has been giving people more reasons for using X app which is either for communication, Grok for money etc. and will continue to offer more avenues to make life useful on this app and this would users compelling reasons for using this app.
As per X, January month saw a major spike in overall engagement with February expected to beat that numbers while first time downloads also went up by 50%. Also, long form articles published on X jumped up by 10x whereas the reading of long form posts went up by 17x. he also talked about the development of X Money which would he visualizes would be the next big thing for X.
Musk wants to create an all in one platform where users will be able to shop, engage and pay bills all in a single app, similar to what users do on WeChat. All this has not been able to shape properly as they have been struggling to get regulatory approvals in some US states.
X Money has been operating internally right now and there is an expectation of public launch within the next two months. Musk has this history of overly optimistic projections, let’s see how X Money fares in 2026.
Musk did not provide insights into its ad business so there is still no clarity into the performance of the app but the notes do provide some insight into how the X project has been evolving and looking out for ways for making it a more valuable and engaging platform.
It forms a major part of AI plans of X with X data feeding into the xAI system therefore it is a crucial puzzle piece for broader plans of Musk and it would be really interesting to see how he will be able to get more audience in 2026.
Elon Musk has been really working on making X the next warhorse in the world of internet and plans to leave all of them behind if his ideas are able to take shape, let’s see whether he would be able to realize his dreams or not.
