Elon Musk’s Controversial X Staffer Steps Back After Nearly 30 Products

Nikita Bier is stepping back as X’s product chief after 400 days. He stays on at Elon Musk’s platform as an advisor.

He left with a number. X shipped nearly 30 new products on his watch, he said Wednesday. The independent data tells a harder story.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster. I'll be stepping back from leading product for 𝕏 and will continue on as an advisor.Serving the X community has been the privilege of a lifetime. X is, and will remain, the most… pic.twitter.com/hHpnY30L6c

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) August 5, 2026

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Nikita Bier Shipped Fast and Left a Long Receipt

Bier got the job in July 2025. He had built tbh and Gas, two teen apps that Facebook and Discord later bought. 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 back to the drawing board.

Traders felt it. One pilot put live market data inside posts. It drove an estimated $1 billion in Cashtags trading volume within 48 hours.

He also shipped Grok powered custom timelines, a topic snooze tool, and country of origin labels on profiles. The XChat App Store debut beat ChatGPT and Claude.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster,” wrote Bier.

The Growth Claims Do Not Fully Survive the Filings

Bier says X climbed 70 places in the App Store in a year. That figure is his own. No third party has published X’s rank for August 2025.

It also depends on the chart. X (Twitter) sits at No. 6 among free iPhone apps today. On all-categories charts, it sits near No. 34.

Other numbers point down. SpaceX’s May IPO filing put X at 550 million monthly users in March. X had publicly claimed 600 million.

The same document showed 2025 ad revenue of $1.8 billion. In 2022, before Musk bought the company, it was $4.4 billion. App analytics firm 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 first non-compliance decision ever issued under the Digital Services Act. Bier terminated the European Commission’s ad account the next day.

Crypto traders 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 charge. He rejected the crypto content suppression claims and blamed reply farming.

Grok proved harder to defend. California Attorney General Rob Bonta opened an investigation into xAI on Jan. 14 over nonconsensual sexual imagery. A cease-and-desist letter followed two days later.

Bier now hands three engineers a roadmap bending toward payments and trading. They inherit both his shipping pace and his fights.