The SpaceX IPO Reveals What Actually Occurred to Twitter

Photograph-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photograph: Chesnot/Getty Pictures

If you wish to know what has occurred to Twitter, the app and the web site, previously few years, you’ll be able to simply open up X and see for your self. Like every little thing else on the web, it has turn out to be a bit extra like TikTok, filled with content material suggestions and video. It has paid subscriptions now, which get you a verification badge and an opportunity to be seen (everybody else lives within the spam folder). It’s extra of a right-wing area, conspicuously organized round its new proprietor’s preferences and pursuits, and has turn out to be, regardless of the existence of President Trump’s Reality Social, the de facto digital dwelling of the MAGA motion. Additionally, AI chatbot Grok is there. The platform’s affect in 2026 is spiky and unusual. Lecturers have left, for instance; so have many entertainers and far of the media. Individuals nonetheless speak about sports activities, although, and joke round about popular culture. It’s the place the AI discourse lives and the place finance tries to course of it. Everybody there shares one factor in widespread: They see numerous posts by and about Elon Musk on subjects like anti-white racism, trans individuals, the loss of life of western civilization, and the way the finale of The Boys was “pretend and homosexual,” in addition to his position overseeing the IPO of SpaceX, which is about to be the largest in historical past by a big margin.

If you wish to know what has occurred to Twitter the enterprise, it’s important to look just a little tougher. Together with his buy and rebranding of the platform, Musk took the general public firm personal and hasn’t shared a lot in the way in which of credible information about the way it’s doing. In 2025, X was acquired by xAI, one other Musk firm, and in 2026, xAI was acquired by SpaceX. This week, the Musk conglomerate’s pre-IPO submitting with the SEC reveals that the corporate is at present dropping cash general, suggests it might sooner or later nook a $28.5 trillion addressable area and AI market, and makes the case for elevating as much as $75 billion within the meantime so humanity would possibly escape “the identical destiny as dinosaurs.”

As seen as X is within the exterior world, although, and as integral as it’s to Musk’s public picture, in SpaceX’s 150-plus pages of company prospectus, it hardly exhibits up. And when it does, issues don’t look nice.

The numbers that are shared inform a narrative of decline, losses, and legal responsibility. Promoting income fell by almost $600 million in 2023, bounced again a bit in 2024, and stored slipping once more in 2025. As for the subscription enterprise, the corporate has reached “roughly 6.3 million lively paid subscribers” to X and round 1.9 million to variations of Grok (some X subscriptions include expanded entry to Grok). The corporate recorded a onetime, $3.75 billion impairment “primarily associated … to the Twitter model following its rebranding to X.” The prospectus describes a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} of settlements stemming from Musk’s large, early, and chaotic cuts on the agency after he took over; wanting ahead, it suggests Musk’s different companies, together with the worthwhile Starlink, face political dangers from their reference to X, citing the corporate’s 2024 free-speech battle with the Brazilian authorities.

Then there are the numbers we don’t get, ones an organization may be inclined to share in the event that they informed a very good story: We don’t actually understand how many individuals use both Grok or X, solely that the 2 mixed have 1.3 billion “supported accounts lively within the final twelve months,” changing to 520 million month-to-month lively customers, with the caveats that “supported account” is outlined as “a human, bot or related account that logged into the X platform or Grok” and that the quantity “could embrace pretend, spam or bot accounts if they’re lively.”

To the restricted extent the SpaceX potential makes a case for X as a enterprise, it’s in help of Grok as a “real-time data, leisure, and free speech platform” that “serves as a foundational distribution and information engine for our AI ecosystem and additional enhances Grok’s truth-seeking goal.” Having a funnel to direct individuals to your specific AI platform is clearly priceless, however solely if in case you have one they may wish to use. In a world the place AI companies more and more depend on artificial information for coaching and a few of your largest rivals additionally oversee or have entry to huge portions of human-generated real-time textual content, it’s not clear what kind of benefit X actually offers or has supplied to this point. xAI, in any case, is nowhere close to the entrance of the AI race because it stands, and it quantities, on paper, to a cash pit.

You possibly can learn this as vindication for a few of Musk’s critics, who warned that working a social community like Twitter is in truth tough. You may also learn it as affirmation that, for all of the strife and quitting and unbanning and refashioning of X into a spot that feels fairly completely different, the underlying construction and essence of the factor hasn’t really modified that a lot: Right here nonetheless we’ve got networks of posters, together with clusters of genuinely influential individuals, who’re compelled to come back again and who created a type of worth and affect that’s intuitively apparent however stays tough for an proprietor to seize by standard means (promoting, subscriptions, and so on.). This was the curse of Twitter as a public firm — a nebulously essential platform that couldn’t earn cash — and stays one thing Musk each couldn’t repair and appears to have made worse.

However neither story absolutely captures what occurred right here, I don’t assume. Earlier than Musk owned Twitter, he was one of many individuals who did seize quite a lot of worth the platform was producing, within the type of his status, which he cultivated there, and within the enthusiasm of retail traders, whom he led, typically by means of the platform, to put money into Tesla. His final massive social-media-fueled market play drove Tesla to valuations that defied customary accounting logic. Then there’s the largest image: Did shopping for the platform assist Trump win in 2024? In all probability. Did Trump’s win assist clear the trail for Musk’s continued rise? It did, whereas additionally placing him in command of DOGE, which, no matter Musk does along with his life, means his legacy will embrace the cavalier destruction of USAID and the loss of a whole bunch of 1000’s of others.

For some time now, Musk has taken to describing his buy of Twitter as an ideological sacrifice, a $44 billion bulwark in opposition to the tip of free speech, and a supply of ache. By the lens of the SpaceX IPO, although, it appears to be like like one thing barely completely different: a assure that the platform he used to assist construct the cult of Musk — and thru which he more and more appears to interpret, course of, and speak about your entire world round him — would stay intact and attentive to his wants for his subsequent massive pitch, which requires extra religion than his prior one and fewer accountability. You most likely don’t wish to say it immediately in a submitting with the SEC. Nevertheless it’s written throughout this one.