Elon Musk’s Controversial X Staffer Steps Back After Nearly 30 Products
Nikita Bier is stepping again as X’s product chief after 400 days. He stays on at Elon Musk’s platform as an advisor.
He left with a quantity. X shipped practically 30 new merchandise on his watch, he mentioned Wednesday. The impartial information tells a more durable story.
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Nikita Bier Shipped Fast and Left a Long Receipt
Bier received the job in July 2025. He had constructed tbh and Gas, two teen apps that Facebook and Discord later purchased. Both reached No. 1 on the US App Store.
At X he rebuilt the core. The Timeline, the Android app, onboarding, notifications, and chat all went again to the drafting board.
Traders felt it. One pilot put dwell market information inside posts. It drove an estimated $1 billion in Cashtags trading volume inside 48 hours.
He additionally shipped Grok powered custom timelines, a subject snooze instrument, and nation of origin labels on profiles. The XChat App Store debut beat ChatGPT and Claude.
“Ladies and gents, it’s time to cross the torch and demote myself to my pure state: a poster,” wrote Bier.
The Growth Claims Do Not Fully Survive the Filings
Bier says X climbed 70 locations within the App Store in a 12 months. That determine is his personal. No third get together has revealed X’s rank for August 2025.
It additionally relies on the chart. X (Twitter) sits at No. 6 amongst free iPhone apps at present. On all-categories charts, it sits close to No. 34.
Other numbers level down. SpaceX’s May IPO filing put X at 550 million month-to-month customers in March. X had publicly claimed 600 million.
The similar doc confirmed 2025 advert income of $1.8 billion. In 2022, earlier than Musk purchased the corporate, it was $4.4 billion. App analytics agency Appfigures counted 104 million downloads in 2025, down 13%.
Why Nikita Bier Became Musk’s Most Divisive Product Hire
The fights ran louder than the metrics. On Dec. 5, Brussels fined X €120 million. It was the primary non-compliance determination ever issued underneath the Digital Services Act. Bier terminated the European Commission’s advert account the subsequent day.
Crypto merchants turned on him in January. They accused him of throttling crypto posts. He had joined Solana as an advisor in March 2025, which sharpened the cost. He rejected the crypto content suppression claims and blamed reply farming.
Grok proved more durable to defend. California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened an investigation into xAI on Jan. 14 over nonconsensual sexual imagery. A cease-and-desist letter adopted two days later.
Bier now palms three engineers a roadmap bending towards funds and buying and selling. They inherit each his delivery tempo and his fights.
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