If you want to know what has happened to Twitter, the app and the website, in the past few years, you can just open up X and see for yourself. Like everything else on the internet, it has become a bit more like TikTok, full of content recommendations and video. It has paid subscriptions now, which get you a verification badge and a chance to be seen (everyone else lives in the spam folder). It’s more of a right-wing space, conspicuously arranged around its new owner’s preferences and interests, and has become, despite the existence of President Trump’s Truth Social, the de facto digital home of the MAGA movement. Also, AI chatbot Grok is there. The platform’s influence in 2026 is spiky and strange. Academics have left, for example; so have many entertainers and much of the media. People still talk about sports, though, and joke around about pop culture. It’s where the AI discourse lives and where finance tries to process it. Everyone there shares one thing in common: They see a lot of posts by and about Elon Musk on topics like anti-white racism, trans people, the death of western civilization, and how the finale of The Boys was “fake and gay,” as well as his role overseeing the IPO of SpaceX, which is set to be the biggest in history by a large margin.

If you want to know what has happened to Twitter the business, you have to look a little harder. With his purchase and rebranding of the platform, Musk took the public company private and hasn’t shared much in the way of credible data about how it’s doing. In 2025, X was acquired by xAI, another Musk company, and in 2026, xAI was acquired by SpaceX. This week, the Musk conglomerate’s pre-IPO filing with the SEC reveals that the company is currently losing money overall, suggests........

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