X (formerly Twitter)
Owner / Executive Chairman & CTO
The global town square Musk acquired for $44B, pioneered crowdsourced fact-checking, and is rebuilding as an "everything app."
x.com$44B
Acquisition price (2022)
~570–600M
Monthly users (2026 est.)
Meta, TikTok
Community Notes adopters
xAI (2025)
Merged into
Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 and set out to rebuild it as "X," an everything-app combining social media, payments, video and AI, modeled on China's WeChat.
X's most influential contribution is Community Notes — a crowdsourced fact-checking system whose "bridging" algorithm only shows a note when people who usually disagree both rate it helpful. It scaled to well over a million notes across dozens of languages, applies even to Musk's own posts, and was subsequently adopted by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) and TikTok. A 2025 PNAS study found it reduced the spread of false information.
X still operates at large scale — on the order of 570–600 million monthly users — and is rolling out X Money payments with Visa and expanded creator payouts. In 2025 Musk's xAI acquired X, fusing the platform's real-time data with frontier AI.
Milestones
Musk completes the $44B acquisition of Twitter.
Rebranded to X with the "everything app" vision.
X Money payments announced with Visa as first partner.
Acquired by xAI in an all-stock merger.
Sources