For three and a half years, every public statistic about X (formerly Twitter) was either a third-party estimate, a Musk public statement, or — increasingly — a number circulating between secondary aggregators with no traceable primary source. That changed on 20 May 2026, when SpaceX filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC ahead of its planned IPO. Because SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026 (and xAI had previously acquired X in March 2025), the filing disclosed revenue, capital expenditure, and operating-KPI figures for the combined X + Grok ecosystem.
This guide rebuilds the X platform picture from the filing-disclosed numbers up. Where the S-1 discloses a figure directly, the S-1 is the source. Where it does not, we cite a named third party — eMarketer for advertising revenue, The Information for subscription ARR, Pew Research for US demographics, and Sprout Social for cross-platform engagement benchmarks. Anything we cannot source we say so, and a final section lists the metrics that remain private after the filing.
- 01550M MAU in March 2026 — the first S-1-disclosed X figure since 2022.SpaceX's 20 May 2026 S-1 reports 550M monthly active users across X + Grok, of which 117M actively use Grok features. This is the first management-disclosed X user count published in an SEC filing since Twitter last reported 237.8M mDAU in Q2 2022. The filing also reports over 1.3B supported accounts active over the prior 12 months and approximately 350M daily posts. Prior third-party estimates ranged from roughly 480M to 620M MAU.
- 02$3.2B AI-segment revenue against a $6.4B operating loss.Per the S-1 financial statements, the xAI / X AI segment generated $3.2B of FY2025 revenue (up from $2.62B in 2024) against a $6.4B operating loss (up from $1.56B). Capex was $12.7B in FY2025 and a further $7.7B in Q1 2026 alone. The segment is a heavily-invested-in growth business, not a profitable one.
- 03Subscription business is now structural, with 6.3M active paid subscribers.The S-1 reports 6.3M active paid subscribers as of 31 March 2026 — 4.4M for X and 1.9M for Grok. X + Grok subscription revenue rose by $365M in FY2025 and by a further $177M in Q1 2026 alone. The Information reported approximately $1B in subscription ARR by February 2026. X is one of the few major social platforms deriving meaningful revenue from end-user subscriptions.
- 04Advertising is recovering but still about half its pre-Musk scale.eMarketer's published forecast places X's 2025 global ad revenue at $2.26B (+16.5% YoY), the first annual increase since Musk's 2022 acquisition. Twitter reported $4.51B in 2021 as a public company, so the platform is still operating at roughly half its pre-acquisition advertising scale even with the recovery.
- 0521% of US adults use X, with a clear B2B-friendly skew.Pew Research's November 2025 social media report (5,022 US adults, surveyed Feb–Jun 2025) shows X used by 21% of US adults — below YouTube (84%), Facebook (71%), Instagram (50%), and TikTok (37%). Within that, X skews male (25% vs 16%), younger (33% of 18–29), and higher-income (26% of $70–99K households).
- 06Grok is the largest disclosed AI-feature MAU at social-platform scale.117M Grok MAU is the largest in-app AI-feature MAU disclosed in the public record by a social platform. The S-1 details Anthropic's commitment to pay $1.25B/month through May 2029 for access to xAI's Colossus 1 compute (220K+ NVIDIA GPUs) — a deal that could total roughly $45B if maintained, subject to a 90-day termination clause and reduced fees during ramp-up.
- 07Several frequently-cited X metrics remain undisclosed.Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU), Premium subscriber count by tier (Basic / Premium / Premium+), platform-level CPMs, country-by-country MAU, daily Grok query volume inside the app, and Communities/Spaces usage are all still private. Any specific figure circulating for these is an estimate without a primary source — name the source when citing.
01 — The S-1 disclosureThe first SEC-filed X numbers since 2022.
X went private on 27 October 2022 when Elon Musk completed the $44B acquisition. From that day until 20 May 2026, no X user or revenue figure existed in the SEC record. The SpaceX S-1 filing changes that by virtue of corporate structure: xAI acquired X in March 2025, SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026, and SpaceX is now consolidating xAI and X under its umbrella ahead of its IPO. That consolidation forces a Form S-1 with audited financial statements and management-disclosed operating KPIs for the combined entity.
X + Grok, March 2026
First SEC-disclosed X user count since Q2 2022. The combined figure covers both the X platform and Grok AI features under the xAI/X reporting structure consolidated under SpaceX after the February 2026 acquisition. The S-1 also reports over 1.3B supported accounts active over the prior 12 months and approximately 350M daily posts.
AI-feature active users
21.3% of the combined ecosystem actively uses Grok features. This is the largest in-app AI-feature MAU disclosed in the public record by a social platform, though direct cross-platform comparison is difficult because most peers do not disclose AI-feature MAU separately.
Revenue, up from $2.62B in 2024
Combined xAI + X AI segment revenue grew about 22% year-over-year. Against this, the segment posted a $6.4B operating loss (up from $1.56B in 2024) driven by $12.7B of capex in 2025 and a further $7.7B in Q1 2026 alone.
02 — Platform scaleWhere the 550M figure sits in context.
The S-1's 550M MAU figure sits within a wider range of third-party estimates that circulated during the private window. Public statements from Musk and X executives ranged from 550M to 600M+ over the past 18 months; aggregator estimates ranged from roughly 480M to 620M. The S-1 number is the first that resolves those estimates against a management-disclosed count, and the figure lands inside the bottom half of the prior range.
| Period | Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q2 2022 (last public) | mDAU | 237.8M | Twitter 10-Q (final pre-private) |
| March 2026 (S-1) | X + Grok MAU | 550M | SpaceX S-1 |
| March 2026 (S-1) | Grok MAU | 117M | SpaceX S-1 |
| Prior 12 months (S-1) | Supported accounts | 1.3B+ | SpaceX S-1 |
| March 2026 (S-1) | Daily posts | ~350M | SpaceX S-1 |
| 2024–2026 (estimates) | MAU range (third-party) | ~480M – 620M | aggregators (estimate band only) |
| Q1 2026 | mDAU | — | Not disclosed since 2022 |
| Em-dash indicates no SEC-filed figure exists for that metric/period. mDAU (monetizable daily active users) is an internal Twitter metric and cannot be computed externally. | |||
What MAU, DAU, and mDAU actually mean
MAU (monthly active users) counts unique accounts that took any action on the platform within the prior 30 days. DAU (daily active users) is the equivalent for a single day. mDAU (monetizable daily active users) was a Twitter-specific metric introduced in 2019 that excluded logged-out viewers, certain bot networks, and users in regions where ads were not sold — it was the metric advertisers priced against. The S-1 reports MAU, not mDAU. Do not derive a growth rate by dividing 550M by 237.8M — the metrics use different definitions and cannot be compared directly.
03 — Subscription businessFrom experiment to structural revenue line.
X Premium has three U.S. web tiers — Basic ($3/month), Premium ($8/month), and Premium+ ($40/month; pricing varies by country and app store, per X's official pricing page). Subscriber counts by tier have never been disclosed publicly. What the S-1 does disclose is total active paid subscribers and revenue.
| Metric | Figure | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active paid subscribers | 6.3M | March 2026 | SpaceX S-1 |
| X paid subscribers | 4.4M | March 2026 | SpaceX S-1 |
| Grok paid subscribers | 1.9M | March 2026 | SpaceX S-1 |
| Subscription revenue increase (X + Grok) | +$365M | FY2025 vs FY2024 | SpaceX S-1 |
| Subscription revenue increase (X + Grok) | +$177M | Q1 2026 | SpaceX S-1 |
| Subscription ARR (run-rate) | ~$1B | February 2026 | The Information |
| Premium subscriber count by tier | — | — | Not disclosed |
| ARPU, churn, country split | — | — | Not disclosed |
The data points are internally consistent: a $365M FY2025 subscription-revenue increase implies an exit run-rate well below $1B annualized; The Information's February 2026 reporting of approximately $1B ARR sits above the 2025 exit; and the S-1's $177M Q1 2026 figure mechanically annualizes to $708M, a partial-period measurement of an actively-growing book. Taken together, subscription revenue is now a meaningful share of total economics — unusual among major social platforms, which typically derive comparatively little from end-user subscriptions. Definitions differ across the three data points (ARR vs annualized quarter revenue vs revenue increase), so treat them as directionally consistent rather than directly stackable.
Any third-party report citing a specific X Premium subscriber count by tier — for example 14M Premium, 4.7M Premium+, 3.8M Basic — has no primary source. X has never disclosed the split. The S-1 discloses a total of 6.3M paid subscribers across X (4.4M) and Grok (1.9M), and nothing more granular.— Methodology note for media planners and analysts, May 2026
04 — Advertising businessRecovering off the 2023 trough, still about half the 2021 scale.
The advertising business needs two sources, used for two different scopes. The S-1 reports $116M of advertising revenue inside the AI segment for FY2025 — a figure that appears to cover Grok-related advertising rather than the full X-platform legacy ad business. For X platform overall, eMarketer's published forecast (a forecast / estimate, not a platform-disclosed figure) remains the most widely-cited benchmark.
| Metric | Figure | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global ad revenue (pre-Musk peak) | $4.51B | 2021 | Twitter 10-K |
| Global ad revenue (forecast) | $2.26B | 2025 | eMarketer |
| US ad revenue (forecast) | $1.31B | 2025 | eMarketer |
| YoY growth (global, forecast) | +16.5% | 2025 | eMarketer |
| AI-segment ad revenue | $116M | FY2025 | SpaceX S-1 |
| Platform-level CPM, enterprise spend | — | — | Not disclosed by X |
| The $116M S-1 line is AI-segment advertising (Grok-related scope); eMarketer's $2.26B forecast is its estimate of the full X-platform global ad business. The two figures use different scopes and source types — do not subtract or compare them directly. Name the source when citing. | |||
The pattern: a substantial advertising business that is recovering off the 2023 trough for the first time since the ownership change, but is still operating at roughly half its pre-acquisition scale. For comparison, eMarketer's 2025 worldwide digital advertising forecast places Meta at over $160B and Alphabet at over $240B — X remains a small share of the global ad market even after the recovery.
Brand safety and enforcement
X's transparency reports (H1 and H2 2024) are the most authoritative source on enforcement actions. The H1 and H2 2024 disclosures show the following:
| Metric | H1 2024 | H2 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account suspensions | 5.30M | 4.19M | −20.9% |
| Posts removed or labeled | 10.68M | 10.13M | −5.1% |
| Legal removal requests received | 72,703 | 97,006 | +33.4% |
| Legal-removal action rate | 70.82% | 81.89% | +11.07pp |
| Violation rate (share of posts) | 0.0123% | 0.0178% | +0.0055pp |
| Source: X Global Transparency Reports, H1 and H2 2024. Enforcement-volume declines coincided with a 33.4% rise in legal removal requests and a higher action rate. Whether that mix reflects improved upstream filtering or weaker enforcement is contested; brand-safety teams should independently audit pause-lists rather than rely on platform summary statistics. | |||
05 — Grok and the AI layerThe largest disclosed in-app AI MAU at social-platform scale.
117M of the 550M combined ecosystem MAU (21.3%) actively use Grok features. Most other major social platforms do not break out an AI-feature MAU separately, so direct cross-platform comparison is difficult — but 117M is the largest such disclosure currently in the public record. The compute build underpinning it is one of the largest AI-segment capex disclosures tied to a social platform, though Meta and Alphabet disclose materially larger company-wide AI/technical infrastructure capex.
Active Grok users (March 2026)
21.3% of the combined X + Grok ecosystem actively uses Grok features. The S-1 ties Grok directly into X's distribution surface, which the filing identifies as a structural advantage.
Capital expenditure, FY2025
Followed by $7.7B in Q1 2026 alone — a mechanical annualized pace of $30.8B if sustained. For context, Meta's FY2025 capex was $72.22B and Alphabet's was $91.4B, so the SpaceX/xAI line is large in absolute terms but smaller than the largest hyperscalers.
NVIDIA GPUs (H100, H200, GB200)
Per xAI's official Anthropic partnership announcement, Colossus 1 is the compute cluster Anthropic agreed to lease. The Verge reports the deal at $1.25B/month through May 2029 — a total of roughly $45B if maintained, subject to a 90-day termination clause and reduced fees during ramp-up.
For marketers, the structural implication is that Grok-driven discovery — in-app answers, content recommendations, summarized search — is likely to deepen rather than retreat. Content strategy that produces material Grok finds worth citing (original data, structured research, long-form Articles) is structurally favored over pure link-out posts that exist only to push traffic off-platform. The specific magnitudes of that favor (citation rates, reach-lift percentages) are not disclosed; treat any specific number for these as an unverified estimate.
06 — Audience compositionWho actually uses X in the United States.
Pew Research's November 2025 social media report surveyed 5,022 US adults between February and June 2025. It remains the most credible independent demographic snapshot of US X usage. The headline finding: 21% of US adults use X — well below YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
| Segment | Share using X | Note |
|---|---|---|
| All US adults | 21% | YouTube 84% · Facebook 71% · Instagram 50% · TikTok 37% (Pew, same survey) |
| Age 18–29 | 33% | Highest-adoption age cohort |
| Age 30–49 | 25% | — |
| Age 50–64 | 16% | — |
| Age 65+ | 10% | — |
| Men | 25% | Clear male skew vs Facebook / Instagram |
| Women | 16% | — |
| Household income $100K+ | 25% | Income skew favors B2B and financial-services categories |
| Household income $70–99K | 26% | Highest single income-bracket usage |
| Household income under $30K | 16% | — |
| College graduate or higher | 24% | Education skew is mild but present |
| High school or less | 16% | — |
| Source: Pew Research Center, "Americans' Social Media Use 2025" (published Nov 2025; survey field dates 5 Feb – 18 Jun 2025; n = 5,022). | ||
The targeting implication: X's male, higher-income, college-educated skew makes it disproportionately valuable for B2B, technology, financial services, and policy categories. For mass-market consumer reach in the US, Meta and YouTube remain substantially larger and more demographically balanced.
07 — Content & engagementWhat we can and can't say about content performance.
X does not publish platform-level engagement rates, CPMs, or format-performance multipliers. The most credible cross-platform benchmark source is the Sprout Social Index, which analyzed roughly three billion social messages from more than one million public profiles between February 2024 and January 2025 for its 2025 Content Benchmarks Report.
| Benchmark | Figure | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Average brand posts per day | 9.5 | Across all networks, 2024 |
| Average daily inbound engagements | +20% YoY | 70 → 83 per day (2023 → 2024) |
| X-specific daily engagements (Sprout cohort) | 13 (steady) | Per-profile median, 2024 cohort |
| Brand posting frequency vs prior year | ↓ (lower) | "Quality over quantity" shift |
| Source: Sprout Social 2025 Content Benchmarks Report (~3B messages from 1M+ public profiles, Feb 2024 – Jan 2025) and Sprout's industry benchmarks page. Cross-network figures with X-specific values where Sprout broke them out. | ||
Creator payouts — direction without disclosure
In December 2025, Musk publicly endorsed a step-change in creator payouts on X, with head of product Nikita Bier tasked with implementation. Multiple creator reports in early 2026 cited payouts doubling or tripling versus prior cycles. X has not disclosed an annual total payout figure.
For scale comparison: Alphabet's 2024 10-K reports YouTube advertising revenue of $36.15B, and YouTube's official "Made on YouTube" 2025 update states that YouTube has paid more than $100B to creators, artists, and media companies over the prior four years. No official single-year 2024 YouTube creator-payout figure has been published. The order-of-magnitude gap between YouTube's creator economy and X's is real and material, but the precise multiple is not directly knowable from official sources.
08 — What's still not publicMetrics that remain private after the filing.
Even after the SpaceX S-1, a number of X metrics that marketers and analysts commonly reference remain undisclosed. Any specific figure circulating for the following should be treated as an estimate without a primary source, and the source should be named explicitly when used in plans, pitches, or reports.
- Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU) — not reported since Q2 2022 (then 237.8M). Cannot be measured externally because the definition is internal to X.
- Premium subscriber count by tier — the S-1 discloses 6.3M total paid subscribers (4.4M X / 1.9M Grok) but does not split the Basic / Premium / Premium+ tiers within X.
- ARPU, churn, and country split for paid subscriptions — not disclosed.
- Platform-level CPMs and CPC averages — X has never disclosed these. Third-party agency benchmarks vary widely by category, geography, and ad format.
- Country-level MAU — Statista and similar aggregators publish estimates, but they are extrapolations from app-install panels, not platform-disclosed figures.
- Daily Grok query volume inside X — only the Grok MAU (117M) is S-1-disclosed; daily query counts are not.
- Communities and Spaces usage — neither publishes engagement, host counts, or listener metrics in 2025 or 2026.
- Specific creator payout totals — Musk's December 2025 public statements signal direction; annual payout totals remain undisclosed.
- "IAB-rated brand-safe inventory percentage" — the IAB Tech Lab certifies platforms but does not publish a percentage score. Any specific figure attributed to IAB is not an IAB-produced metric.
09 — Decision matrixWhen to plan around X, and when to plan past it.
The S-1 numbers and the Pew demographic split together sharpen the decision. X is a complement to broader social channels for specific audience and content categories, not a substitute for the larger platforms.
Audiences that skew male, higher-income, news-driven
Pew shows X at 25% reach among US men, 25% among $100K+ households, 24% among college grads — well above platform average. For B2B SaaS, fintech, professional services, and policy categories, X is disproportionately valuable as a thought-leadership and breaking-news channel.
Native fit for the audience already on platform
X is the default real-time channel for the technology and AI sectors. Combined with Grok integration deepening discovery, original data and structured research posts get measurable downstream amplification. Pair X with LinkedIn for the same audience.
Journalist reach and breaking-news distribution
X retains structural utility for journalist outreach, breaking-news distribution, and policy commentary. Even at 21% US adult reach, the platform's role as a real-time information venue makes it disproportionately useful for PR and earned-media programs.
DTC, retail, and broad lifestyle categories
Meta (Facebook 71% / Instagram 50%) and YouTube (84%) deliver substantially larger US adult reach. For mass-market consumer campaigns where reach matters more than audience composition, X is a complement at best — plan it as Tier 2 rather than Tier 1.
Beauty, parenting, lifestyle
X's male skew (25% vs 16% women) inverts the audience for categories that index female. Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok offer audience composition substantially better matched to these brands. X is optional rather than required.
Performance media at scale
Mobile-app install ads and direct-response performance media at scale remain Meta- and TikTok-dominated. X's recovering but still-half-of-2021 advertising scale, combined with non-disclosure of platform CPMs, makes it difficult to plan as a primary performance channel.
10 — ConclusionThe most credible X picture available in the public record.
X is a smaller, more specific platform than the largest aggregator estimates suggested — and a more durable one than the 2023 narrative implied.
The S-1-disclosed 550M MAU figure is lower than several widely-cited third-party estimates from 2024 and early 2026, and the underlying business is unprofitable at scale — $6.4B of operating loss against $3.2B of revenue in the AI segment, supported by $12.7B of FY2025 capex and a further $7.7B in Q1 2026 alone. By any financial benchmark this is a heavily-invested-in growth business, not a comparable to Meta or Alphabet's social properties.
But the filing-disclosed picture is also more durable than the "platform collapse" narrative that dominated the immediate post-acquisition period. Ad revenue is recovering for the first time since 2022. Subscription revenue has scaled to ~$1B ARR (The Information) and 6.3M paid subscribers (S-1) — unusual for a major social platform and a structural diversification away from pure advertising. Grok integration is the largest disclosed in-app AI-feature MAU in the category, underwritten by the Anthropic compute deal that Fortune later valued at $1.25B/month (~$15B/year through May 2029).
For operators planning 2026 marketing strategy, the framing is unchanged from the pre-filing version, only sharper: X is a complement, not a substitute. The audience composition makes it disproportionately valuable for B2B, technology, financial services, policy, and PR-led programs. It is not the channel to plan against for mass-market consumer reach or female-skewing categories. The filing-disclosed numbers do not change that pattern — they just make the case more defensible.