With questions still swirling around its moderation and brand safety efforts, and no official CEO to reassure ad partners, can X remain a viable business?
The platform has been under a cloud since Elon Musk purchased the app formerly known as Twitter in 2022. He immediately began reforming it into the platform that he prefers, which enables all types of controversial commentary and content, while punishing opinions that he personally disagrees with.
At the same time, Musk’s broader vision to convert the platform into an “everything app,” through which people can conduct all sorts of financial transactions on top of their social media activities, is yet to come to fruition. And with questions once again being raised about the safety of the platform due to misuse of its artificial intelligence tools, X’s prospects for increased ad spend appear to be shrinking over time.
So if X isn’t making money, will the app continue? And has X usage actually increased or decreased since Musk took over?
On the first question, as to whether X will remain a viable operation, the platform was given a lifeline in March 2025 via its merger with xAI. Musk’s artificial intelligence company has raised significant capital through funding rounds as investors banked on the future of AI, as well as Elon Musk’s tech savvy, with a view to expanded opportunities for the business.
The merger essentially means that xAI now shares funding with X, which reduces the immediate need for X to generate significant income in its own right. The logic here is that xAI needs X as its data input stream, and thus, should be partially funded by xAI investment.
But then again, with reports that xAI is burning through cash as it works to keep up with other AI projects, its capacity to support X is limited. That’s why the expanded merger of xAI and SpaceX, announced in February, solidifies even more funding for X through a broader data pool for Elon Musk’s projects.
SpaceX is expected to launch an IPO later this year, at a valuation of $2 trillion. The subsequent cash injection from the offering should ensure that both X and xAI remain funded for the immediate future as Musk and his team continue to build towards the next stage of their vision.
So X is seemingly safe for now, despite its own revenue streams drying up. Indeed, according to eMarketer, X’s ad revenue reached $2.26 billion in 2025, which is a far cry from the $4.14 billion it made in 2022, the final year before Musk took over. And while the company has also significantly cut costs, at those levels, it remains a financial negative, which means that running X is costing Elon Musk money, which now adds to the expanded costs of SpaceX development.
Which then leads to X’s prospects, and the potential for future ad growth.
On that front, X’s usage in Europe declined in the second half of 2025, with a 15% drop in active users for the period.
X doesn’t share official data on overall usage, so those usage figures are based on EU numbers, reported as part of its DSA obligations.
X itself continues to report “record high” days of engagement. It has also shared various charts showing that overall usage is rising. Yet at the same time, the platform has acknowledged that these data charts only reflect a portion of activity, covering a subset of users, meaning that the data is skewed and likely shows an inflated level of usage.
So, essentially, it’s hard to know how many active users X has, or whether that number is declining.
But it’s certainly not increasing. In May 2024, Elon Musk said that X had reached 600 million monthly active users, the same number it’s reporting two years later.
So while X also said that downloads of the app are up, the actual usage stats don’t reflect this, which means that these new users either aren’t sticking around, or X is losing users as fast as it’s gaining them.
Meanwhile, Meta’s Threads is up to 400 million monthly actives, and that number is rising fast. This could see Threads supplant X as the leading real-time social media platform very soon. That also makes Threads a more appealing option for ad partners, especially as X continues to court controversy. It seems unlikely that many brands are going to be upping their X ad spend anytime soon.
Which ultimately means X remains in a limbo, of sorts, propped up by funding to Elon Musk’s other projects but unable to build a viable business in its own right.
What does that mean for the future of X?
Well, it’s likely all tied in with the potential for SpaceX, which is also tied into Musk’s other businesses, including Tesla, as well as any future prospects. As long as SpaceX is getting money, X will be funded, and that means the platform will continue to function even if users abandon it.
But if usage declines, that will have broader impacts on xAI in terms of data intake. As such, the viability of X remains a relevant concern on a larger scale. Though how much concern there is will likely dictate how much investment X sees, and how much X is able to update and improve its app.
