On July 24, 2023, one day after Elon Musk killed the blue bird and unveiled the Twitter rebrand to X, an anonymous commenter left a prediction buried in a comment thread on GSMArena that nobody thought twice about at the time. Reacting to the news, they wrote simply, “I highly doubt it can last more than 3 years.” It read like a throwaway internet insult, the kind of comment that gets posted a thousand times a day about a thousand different companies. Today is exactly three years later, and it turns out that random commenter was not wrong, they were just wrong about the reason. X did not fold. It got absorbed into something so much bigger that the social media app you scroll every morning is now barely a rounding error on its own balance sheet.
What Actually Happened To The Company Behind The Twitter Rebrand To X
Here is the part almost nobody tracked in real time because it happened through a series of quiet corporate filings rather than a dramatic headline. Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for 44 billion dollars of his own and borrowed money. By March 2025, X had lost so much advertising revenue and value that when Musk merged it into his own AI company, X was valued at just 33 billion dollars net of debt, an on paper loss of roughly 11 billion dollars from what he originally paid for it. One analyst at D.A. Davidson put it bluntly at the time, telling Forbes that Musk was essentially using his sky high AI valuation to make his own Twitter investors whole again. Then, less than a year later, the story escalated again. On February 2, 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, the entity that now contained X, in an all stock deal that valued the combined companies at 1.25 trillion dollars, the largest private merger in corporate history. Musk described the logic in a single line on the platform itself, writing that xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Whatever X is today, it is no longer really a social media company. It is a data layer sitting inside a trillion dollar aerospace and artificial intelligence machine.
The App Itself Tells A Completely Different Story
While the corporate structure was busy multiplying in value, the actual product that people open on their phones every day has been quietly losing ground. X still claims somewhere around 600 million monthly active users, though nobody outside the company can verify that number anymore since it stopped being required to report metrics publicly after going private. What analysts can measure independently is daily usage, and there the picture looks rough. By January 2026, Meta’s Threads had officially pulled ahead of X in daily active users on mobile, according to data reported by Forbes, with X’s daily numbers dropping nearly 12 percent year over year at the same time Threads grew by almost 38 percent. Bluesky, the platform that briefly looked like it might become the real Twitter replacement, has cooled off dramatically since its early momentum, with its own daily user numbers down more than 44 percent year over year. On paper X is still the biggest room in the building, but fewer people are actually walking through the door every day than three years ago.
The Money Side Is Actually Growing, Just From A Much Smaller Base
To be fair to X, not every number is bad news. Global advertising revenue is projected to climb to roughly 2.26 billion dollars for 2025, and the subscription business built around X Premium quietly crossed 1 billion dollars in annualized recurring revenue in February 2026. Grok, the AI chatbot that now lives inside the app, has become central to that turnaround, pulling in paid subscribers through tiers that run as high as 300 dollars a month for power users. The problem is scale and memory. X’s advertising business before Musk’s takeover was pulling in significantly more than it does now, and the current growth, while real, is climbing back up from a hole the company dug itself into during the rebrand years. It is a genuine recovery story, it just is not the same company recovering.
Nobody Actually Stopped Calling It Twitter
Maybe the strangest part of this whole three year experiment is how little the rebrand actually stuck in everyday language. People still say they are tweeting. Friends still ask if you saw something on Twitter. The word “X” never fully replaced the word it was built to erase, and even journalists covering the platform’s own anniversary this month have openly admitted they still think of it as Twitter first. One longtime user summed up that exact feeling in a recent Al Jazeera reflection on the platform’s twentieth year of existence, writing about watching Musk kill off the bird that had defined the platform’s identity for so long. Marketing analysts have pointed to a real, measurable cost from that confusion too, noting that LinkedIn has picked up roughly 70 million new users and grown 8.6 percent in a single year, at least partly fueled by professionals who quietly redirected their attention elsewhere while X sorted out its identity crisis.
Vestiworld Take
The Twitter rebrand to X was never really the story people thought it was in July 2023. Everyone assumed they were watching a company change its name and its logo. What actually happened was a slow, three year transfer of the entire operation into something much larger and much stranger, an aerospace and artificial intelligence empire that now treats the social network as one input among many rather than the whole business. That anonymous commenter on GSMArena was right that the company would not last three years in any recognizable form. They just assumed it would die. Instead it got swallowed, which in Silicon Valley terms might actually be the more embarrassing outcome.
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