Elon Musk’s X had a good idea.
Until Elon Musk got involved.
That appears to be what happened over the last 24 hours: First, Musk’s head of product announced a plan to discourage trolls and other bad actors from abusing the service. Then Musk weighed in and said he was going to shelve the plan.
We’ll explain the details in a minute. But the big takeaway remains the same: Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, remains an erratic owner who seems very difficult to work for.
That’s what his former X CEO Linda Yaccarino learned during her tenure, which lasted two years and ended with a tweet. Now Nikita Bier, who joined as Musk’s head of product last summer, is getting the same lesson.
On Tuesday, Bier announced a change to X’s revenue-sharing system: It would encourage X users who make money by posting on the platform to post about “content that resonates with people in your country, in neighboring countries and people who speak your language.”
That is: Bier’s plan was meant to discourage X users based in places like India, Thailand, and Eastern Europe from riling up big audiences in the US with incendiary posts about US politics.
“While we appreciate everyone’s opinion on American politics, we hope this will disincentivize gaming the attention of US or Japanese accounts and instead, drive diverse conversations on the platform,” Bier wrote.
That seems like a good idea. It’s also one that builds on work Bier had done previously on the platform, when he started disclosing where X users were actually based, which made it clear that lots of accounts that purported to be very interested in American politics and culture wars were run by people outside America.
Bier’s plan wouldn’t prevent those posters from weighing in on US elections or anything else. But it would make it harder for those posters to make money doing that.
And now it’s not happening, per Musk. “We will pause moving forward with this until further consideration,” he told an X user who was complaining about the new policy early Wednesday morning.
This may have been news to Bier, who was on the platform at the same time, defending the policy and telling some users they would make more money with the new system.
So what happened? I’ve asked X and Musk for comment.
It’s hard to imagine Bier making a decision that would affect power users on X without consulting with his boss, who is also X’s biggest power user.
But who knows? Maybe he did, and Musk changed his mind — something he does all the time.
Or maybe he did and Musk forgot, because he’s got a lot on his mind. For instance, he is getting ready to launch what could be the biggest IPO in history, when he files to take SpaceX public — something that could happen in the next few days, per The Information.
That also means he would be taking Twitter/X public, since he merged that company with his xAI business last year, and then merged those companies into SpaceX earlier this year.
I’ll be fascinated to see what the SpaceX filing tells us about the business of X. What’s the shape of its ad business, years after Musk told advertisers to “go fuck yourself?” And what kind of headway has Musk made at replacing lost ad dollars with revenue from paid subscribers — the kind of super-users Bier’s policy might affect?
But I’m also not expecting to learn that much: People who want a piece of SpaceX want it because they’re into the notion of an Elon Musk company that combines an existing satellite business with the prospect of a could-be-big-one-day AI business.
Twitter/X is a sideshow to all of that. And the fact that Musk, who bought the platform as an impulse buy, still treats it like his personal toy — something to tweak, weaponize, or derail on a whim — tells you more about X than any financial disclosure will.
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