X, formerly known as Twitter, was created in 2006 as a microblogging service by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Twitter officially launched and gained massive visibility at the SXSW festival, which subsequently spurred its accelerated growth and user adoption. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the platform began to play an increasingly prominent role in the global discourse on politics, culture, and other key issues of the day. Twitter went public in November 2013 under the ticker symbol TWTR. It raised $1.8 billion in its initial public offering (IPO).
Elon Musk first offered to buy Twitter in April 2022, but did not take over the company until October, after his $44 billion acquisition was finalized following a contentious legal process. At that point, Twitter became a private company again. Musk immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal and took the position for himself. Musk stepped down as CEO in June 2023.
Twitter also merged into Musk's X Corp. in 2023 and officially rebranded to X. Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, which developed the conversational chatbot Grok, acquired X in an all-stock transaction in 2025.
Under Musk's ownership, the company is attempting to become a multifunctional, all-purpose app. The most ambitious part of X's strategy is to integrate financial services into the platform, including payments, banking, and possibly cryptocurrency features. Here’s what you need to know about how X makes money, what it does, recent updates with the platform, and more.
Revenue
What does X do?
X is a social media platform that allows users to post short messages, images, and videos to share with their followers. Users can follow others, engage with content through likes and replies, participate in conversations, and send private messages.
Through the integration with xAI, the platform is developing AI-driven personalization to make the feed more relevant to each user. The large language model (LLM) chatbot Grok is directly integrated into the X platform. Grok has been highly controversial since its launch by xAI.
For X's purposes, Grok functions as a conversational AI assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, analyze content, and even generate images based on its access to current data on X. Because Grok has real-time access to public posts on X, it can theoretically provide up-to-date answers and context on trending topics. User posts on X are also used to train and fine-tune Grok's AI models.
How does X make money?
X makes money through a combination of sources. Advertising still accounts for the vast majority of X's revenue by far, although the total amount has dropped significantly since Musk's takeover. Many brands have reportedly pulled back or reduced spending on the platform over the last few years due to concerns over moderation policies, increased misinformation, and controversial comments on the platform.
However, some major advertisers like Apple (AAPL -0.45%) and Amazon (AMZN +0.56%) have begun to return to the platform, which could signal a potential stabilization in advertising revenue ahead. X also generates revenue by charging users for its X Premium subscription. X charges a monthly or annual fee for its premium subscription tiers -- Basic, Premium, and Premium+, which provide users with features like the ability to edit posts, longer video uploads, and a blue checkmark.
As part of the premium subscription, X also offers a revenue-sharing program for creators who meet certain eligibility requirements. This program allows creators to earn a portion of the ad revenue generated from ads displayed in the replies to their posts. X shares ad revenue with creators who meet certain criteria, such as having at least 500 followers and generating a large number of impressions on their posts.
The platform also enables creators to sell products directly from their profile through X Shops and offer paid content through Paid Spaces. Musk is building a digital payments and banking service with the aim of diversifying X's revenue and reducing reliance on ad dollars.
Musk wants X to offer various financial services like savings accounts and loans through X Money, so that payments are a core part of the platform. The company is also exploring other revenue streams, including licensing its data for use by AI companies.
X’s financials
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in late 2022, the company was taken private and delisted, which ended its requirement to release public financial reports. Current financial information is based on leaked data and estimates. That said, after a period of sharp decline following Elon Musk's acquisition, the company's financial health seems to be improving.
In 2023, X reportedly delivered total revenue of approximately $3.4 billion, a double-digit decline from the previous year. The drop was primarily due to a mass exodus of advertisers at the time. Industry estimates now show that X could report as much as $2.9 billion in revenue in 2025 and achieve its first year of growth in ad sales since Elon Musk's takeover. However, that top-line figure is significantly lower than the $5.1 billion in revenue Twitter generated in 2021, the last full year before Musk's acquisition.
The X Premium subscription service reportedly generates just around $200 million in annual revenue, so it’s still a very small part of the company's overall financial picture. X reportedly generated $1.25 billion in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) in 2024. This figure is approximately double Twitter's adjusted EBITDA of $682 million in 2021, its last full year before the acquisition.
X has also made progress in addressing its heavy debt load of approximately $12.5 billion from the 2022 acquisition. A group of Wall Street banks initially held the debt but subsequently sold it to investors, completing the sales in April 2025. X also reportedly refinanced a high-cost portion of the buyout financing, a move that was aimed at cutting millions from the company's annual interest expenses.
While the financial situation has improved, the buyout debt remains a major factor in X's performance. Annual interest payments were estimated in the ballpark of more than $1 billion as of the end of 2024. Financials shared with investors in early 2025 showed that X's balance sheet was improving, with cash on hand approaching $1.1 billion.
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Recent developments
In March 2025, reports emerged that X's valuation had rebounded to $44 billion, the same price Musk paid in 2022. The increased valuation was attributable to secondary financing rounds and an improvement in market sentiment. The turnaround marked a significant recovery from X's reported valuation low of $5.3 billion in late 2023. The merger with Musk's AI company xAI has also provided a new financial safety net. xAI can provide funding for the X platform, which it uses as a data source for its AI models.
Still, X remains vulnerable to the whims of its advertisers and the broader ad market. Its recent rebound coincided with a U.S. election cycle that temporarily benefited the platform, but sustained ad spending is still an open question. X faces serious competition for users and market share from rival social platforms, such as Meta Platforms’ (META +0.50%) Threads. The rollout of X Money, Musk's planned in-stream payment system, has also been stalled by regulators.
Musk recently announced that X will transition to a fully AI-powered algorithm by November 2025, using xAI's Grok to create hyper-personalized content feeds that users can adjust in real time. This move is intended to shift away from the mainstream algorithm to provide users with more control over their timelines and a more tailored experience. The company plans to make the new algorithm source code open to developers every two weeks to increase transparency.
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