American social-media platform, formerly known as Twitter, owned by Elon Musk. Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X.
Linda Yaccarino, a former advertising executive at NBCUniversal, was hired as chief executive in 2023 to turn around the company's faltering ad business. Five months into her tenure Musk told X's biggest advertisers to "go fuck yourself". The company's ad revenue fell by more than half that year. Ad revenue was on track to grow again in 2025, but remained well below its pre-Musk level.
X filed a lawsuit against an ad-industry group that it claimed had organised a boycott of the platform. The group denied this but shut down, citing the drain on its finances. Earlier in 2025 X reportedly hinted to Omnicom and Interpublic, a pair of big advertising companies, that their proposed merger might be scuppered by Musk's friends in the White House unless they bought more ads on X.
Yaccarino resigned on July 9th 2025 after X's in-house chatbot, Grok, declared that Adolf Hitler would be the best person to address anti-white hatred.
X's audience has been declining by a couple of per cent each year since Musk's acquisition, but has not collapsed as many predicted. Threads, a copycat app made by Meta, appears to be chasing a different audience. The political composition of the audience has shifted: when Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, it was used by 38% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans; by September 2025 it was used by 26% of Democrats and 32% of Republicans, according to the Civic Health and Institutions Project, a joint initiative of Harvard, Northeastern, Rochester and Rutgers universities.
Under Musk, X removed many restrictions on speech. Users receive a less filtered feed than in the Twitter days. X's algorithm appears less likely to promote links to mainstream media than in the past. A study by Burak Özturan of Northeastern University and colleagues found that the average quality of news sources shared on the platform—as defined by Newsguard, which rates the reliability of online sources—fell during Musk's first six months in charge. In January 2025 Meta announced that it would stop fact-checking on its own platforms, in favour of a volunteer-based system championed by X.
On December 24th 2025 Musk announced that Grok had been updated with a new image generator. The chatbot was far less likely than rivals to refuse requests to generate images violating content policies, including "nudification" of real people. Because Grok could be accessed publicly on X, it was fielding a hundred such requests a minute before an update on January 9th limited the feature to paying subscribers. Indonesia, home to 24m X users, temporarily banned Grok, calling the imagery "a serious violation of human rights". Malaysia (5m users) followed suit. Britain accelerated enforcement of new laws against nude deepfakes and Ofcom opened an investigation into breaches of the Online Safety Act; for serious breaches, Ofcom can levy penalties of up to 10% of a firm's global revenue—around $250m in X's case. On January 14th 2026 X announced that Grok would no longer produce nude deepfakes of real people in jurisdictions where it is illegal.
The ambition for X to become an "everything app" remains unrealised. In January 2025 X announced a partnership with Visa to create a digital wallet, to launch later that year.
Excellent time to become a missing person.