Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images
If you want to know what has happened to Twitter, the app and the website, in the past few years, you can just open up X and see for yourself. Like everything else on the internet, it has become a bit more like TikTok, full of content recommendations and video. It has paid subscriptions now, which get you a verification badge and a chance to be seen (everyone else lives in the spam folder). It’s more of a right-wing space, conspicuously arranged around its new owner’s preferences and interests, and has become, despite the existence of President Trump’s Truth Social, the de facto digital home of the MAGA movement. Also, AI chatbot Grok is there. The platform’s influence in 2026 is spiky and strange. Academics have left, for example; so have many entertainers and much of the media. People still talk about sports, though, and joke around about pop culture. It’s where the AI discourse lives and where finance tries to process it. Everyone there shares one thing in common: They see a lot of posts by and about Elon Musk on topics like anti-white racism, trans people, the death of western civilization, and how the finale of The Boys was “fake and gay,” as well as his role overseeing the IPO of SpaceX, which is set to be the biggest in history by a large margin.
If you want to know what has happened to Twitter the business, you have to look a little harder. With his purchase and rebranding of the platform, Musk took the public company private and hasn’t shared much in the way of credible data about how it’s doing. In 2025, X was acquired by xAI, another Musk company, and in 2026, xAI was acquired by SpaceX. This week, the Musk conglomerate’s pre-IPO filing with the SEC reveals that the company is currently losing money overall, suggests it could one day corner a $28.5 trillion addressable space and AI market, and makes the case for raising up to $75 billion in the meantime so humanity might escape “the same fate as dinosaurs.”
As visible as X is in the outside world, though, and as integral as it is to Musk’s public image, in SpaceX’s 150-plus pages of corporate prospectus, it hardly shows up. And when it does, things don’t look great.
The numbers that are shared tell a story of decline, losses, and liability. Advertising revenue fell by nearly $600 million in 2023, bounced back a bit in 2024, and kept slipping again in 2025. As for the subscription business, the company has reached “approximately 6.3 million active paid subscribers” to X and around 1.9 million to versions of Grok (some X subscriptions come with expanded access to Grok). The company recorded a onetime, $3.75 billion impairment “primarily related … to the Twitter brand following its rebranding to X.” The prospectus describes hundreds of millions of dollars of settlements stemming from Musk’s massive, early, and chaotic cuts at the firm after he took over; looking forward, it suggests Musk’s other businesses, including the profitable Starlink, face political risks from their connection with X, citing the company’s 2024 free-speech battle with the Brazilian government.
Then there are the numbers we don’t get, ones a company might be inclined to share if they told a particularly good story: We don’t really know how many people use either Grok or X, only that the two combined have 1.3 billion “supported accounts active in the last twelve months,” converting to 520 million monthly active users, with the caveats that “supported account” is defined as “a human, bot or similar account that logged into the X platform or Grok” and that the number “may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active.”
To the limited extent the SpaceX prospective makes a case for X as a business, it’s in support of Grok as a “real-time information, entertainment, and free speech platform” that “serves as a foundational distribution and data engine for our AI ecosystem and further enhances Grok’s truth-seeking objective.” Having a funnel to direct people to your particular AI platform is clearly valuable, but only if you have one they might want to use. In a world where AI firms increasingly rely on synthetic data for training and some of your biggest competitors also oversee or have access to enormous quantities of human-generated real-time text, it’s not clear what sort of advantage X really provides or has provided so far. xAI, in any case, is nowhere near the front of the AI race as it stands, and it amounts, on paper, to a money pit.
You can read this as vindication for some of Musk’s critics, who warned that running a social network like Twitter is in fact difficult. You can also read it as confirmation that, for all the strife and quitting and unbanning and refashioning of X into a place that feels quite different, the underlying structure and essence of the thing hasn’t actually changed that much: Here still we have networks of posters, including clusters of genuinely influential people, who are compelled to come back and who created a sort of value and influence that is intuitively obvious but remains difficult for an owner to capture by conventional means (advertising, subscriptions, etc.). This was the curse of Twitter as a public company — a nebulously important platform that couldn’t make money — and remains something Musk both couldn’t fix and seems to have made worse.
But neither story fully captures what happened here, I don’t think. Before Musk owned Twitter, he was one of the people who did capture a great deal of value the platform was producing, in the form of his reputation, which he cultivated there, and in the enthusiasm of retail investors, whom he led, often through the platform, to invest in Tesla. His last big social-media-fueled market play drove Tesla to valuations that defied standard accounting logic. Then there’s the biggest picture: Did buying the platform help Trump win in 2024? Probably. Did Trump’s win help clear the path for Musk’s continued rise? It did, while also putting him in charge of DOGE, which, whatever Musk does with his life, means his legacy will include the cavalier destruction of USAID and the loss of hundreds of thousands of others.
For a while now, Musk has taken to describing his purchase of Twitter as an ideological sacrifice, a $44 billion bulwark against the end of free speech, and a source of pain. Through the lens of the SpaceX IPO, though, it looks like something slightly different: a guarantee that the platform he used to help build the cult of Musk — and through which he increasingly seems to interpret, process, and talk about the entire world around him — would remain intact and attentive to his needs for his next big pitch, which requires more faith than his prior one and less accountability. You probably don’t want to say it directly in a filing with the SEC. But it’s written all over this one.
