Since Elon Musk bought Twitter a year ago, he has blown it up to create something else entirely.
What is now called X is in the process of becoming a single application that encompasses everything, he recently told employees. Being the digital town square, as he has described Twitter in the past, isnt enough. For X to succeed in Musks eyes, the platform needs to compete with YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and the entire banking industry.
Were rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app, Musk said during an internal X meeting on October 26th, which The Verge listened to and is publishing a full transcript of below. The meeting was timed to the anniversary of Musk officially buying Twitter for $44 billion and was his first joint all-hands with Linda Yaccarino, who joined as CEO in May.
Musk, who still oversees Xs product and engineering teams, did most of the talking during the 45-minute call. While the goal of the all-hands was partially to answer the questions that employees submitted ahead of time, he instead took the opportunity to pontificate on everything from sharing bad news in meetings to the state of journalism.
Turning Twitter into X has been a messy process so far. The companys biggest advertisers have mostly fled over the past year, thanks to Musks antics; his X Premium subscription hasnt caught on; the business is still not profitable; and its valuation is sinking.
Musk, however, projected optimism during the call last week, saying at one point: I think this is the fastest rate of innovation maybe ever for any internet company.
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Linda Yaccarino: Its our all-hands, and I want to say thank you to everyone on this call, and especially for everyone in acknowledging what weve been able to accomplish in what has been a remarkable first year since the acquisition. It would be absolutely impossible not to acknowledge all the hard work from everybody around the world whos on this call, especially as weve had to come together since the terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel. Unspeakable times were living through. It has been 20 days since our teams have been working around the clock to keep this platform safe and a place of connection for those most in need. So, I genuinely say thank you.
Ive been here about 16 weeks. And that means that for about half the year, I was actually on the outside looking in. That outside view is actually what drew me here. And I have to tell you, the insider view: intoxicating. Im grateful to be with all of you. Whats most incredible since I joined the company is the scope of our ambition. The pace of innovation at this company, seriously, nothing else like it exists. No analog for whats going on here. Before I came to X, I was always trying to push our customers, my company, to move faster. No worries. I dont have to do that here. Speed is at our core. The hustle and pace is enviable, and what were building here is completely reshaping what our users and our clients expect of a platform.
We have to take a moment and think about what weve done in just a year. The advancements weve made in video, growing our communities, our creator program, X Hiring. I dont know about you, but some of you may have been victims to all my video calling last night. It doesnt stop. And with payments around the corner, I think its pretty exciting to say that theres no surrogate for X, which is why everyone watches our every move
Elon Musk: And copies us.
LY: When youre as consequential as X is, watching every move, I guess its to be expected. We need to get used to it. We need to lean in and own it. And Im intentionally using the word consequential because were creating something a lot more meaningful here. Were working to protect the freedom of expression. What were doing here in building at X is helping humanity thrive.
Listen, I know the decisions we make are not always expected ones, not always the easy ones. Change, innovation, pushing against legacy. Its not simple. Its actually really hard. But this company, everyone on the call, [are] exceptional people. Were writing history. Really creating a new playbook. And we know there are skeptics out there, but our momentum we all know its catching on. And in the process, were creating more and more advocates.
So, Im long on X. I certainly am long on all of you. And I just want to say congrats on a great big year. Ready for year two. And with that, I will pass it to Elon.
EM: Thank you, Linda. Thank you for joining. A tremendous amount has been accomplished in the past year. Its really lightning speed execution. Were rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app. [An] all-inclusive feature set that you can basically do anything you want on our system. Obviously, thats not to the exclusion of other apps, but I think the fundamental thing thats missing that would be incredibly useful is a single application that encompasses everything. You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever youd like, from one single, convenient place.
They have this in China, to some degree, with WeChat. We just dont have that. It doesnt exist outside of China. This doesnt mean that we just want to copy WeChat. I think we can actually create something ultimately that exceeds WeChat. We can do some pretty incredible stuff here.
The fundamental thing thats missing that would be incredibly useful is a single application that encompasses everything
So, Ill just run through the list of all the accomplishments the team has made in this year. And I should say that well try to do this every quarter as opposed to every year. A year is quite a long time. Every three months or so, well do this. And the next one we will do with X live video. Well just livestream it to earth, basically. Were a company that believes in transparency, so maximally transparent would be anybody who wants to watch our company talk can do so. And its helpful that were not publicly traded actually because you can say what we want to say without some sort of class action lawsuit.
EM: Its honestly a plague. When I looked at the list, I was like, Wow, this is really incredible. So, most recently, we launched audio / video calling, and I had a number of people actually call me
LY: Did you pick up, Elon?
EM: I did. I thought it was like a FaceTime or Signal call or something like that. Its X audio / video calling. Super cool. Thats the most recent thing thats still kind of like a beta version. But itll have all the functionality that people have come to expect from FaceTime or Signal.
Weve also made radical improvements to video in general. So our live video stream is much better, dramatically better. You can now upload long videos, including an entire movie. I thought it was very cool that Apple, for example, uploaded an entire episode of the Silo show, which is actually quite a good show. I was told that it was the number one biggest social media event that Apple has done in its entire history, which is wild. Obviously, companies should do more than that.
LY: That certainly got everyones attention, and when you think about that, in addition to the immersive video product or vertical video product, a lot of people, or a lot of customers that I talk to, are surprised at the growth, right? Seventy percent growth in the last six months but driven by Gen Z. So, when you think about the strides were making so quickly in video, its certainly getting everyones attention.
You can think of a meme as really compressed information
EM: Yeah. Video is the highest bandwidth way to consume information. Sometimes people wonder [about] Gen Z, Is their mind rushing or something because theyre just watching short videos over and over again? But actually, video is the highest bandwidth means of communication. Certainly, what video you are watching, of course, that can be dubious, but obviously, that is the best way to consume information. You can think of a meme as really compressed information, where youre conveying many different ideas in a single image with some text.
So, Ill go through the list, which is pretty, pretty amazing. Its a fun list, actually.
EM: We launched the ad revenue share for creators or really anyone on the platform. This has made a big difference to the lives of many people. Weve paid over $20 million to creators, and we expect that number to rise significantly. Our number of creators has increased by more than an order of magnitude, and thats just since the middle of this year. In less than six months, weve seen a 10x increase in creators.
Communities is growing fast. Theres a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling. But were seeing rapid percentage growth in Communities. Im excited about some of the changes we made to Communities. One of them I think will be quite powerful is for a community administrator to be able to include any X account. You can add any @ handle that hasnt joined the community.
Take this Diablo community, which Im on. What youd want to see there is obviously anything from Blizzard and maybe top video game commentators who are talking about Diablo, in addition to people who have joined that. So think about it as a community but it also includes a list of accounts, which will, I think, really bring life to Communities. I think thats a simple change but a profound one.
LY: And Elon, think about it. When youre talking about all of our innovation and extending to longform video or movies, all the way to Communities, its whats driving time spent on the platform. With video calling, theyre showing up to do more, which will make it more enjoyable for them, more useful. And they stay longer, so theres a lot more to experience, which is beneficial to everyone, all our partners.
EM: Yeah, absolutely. I think people will find that its incredibly compelling to move from a text comment or video comment to direct messages then to an audio / video call, which will include group audio and video calling, and then do payments. For payments, were really just waiting for all the approvals, which we should hopefully get in the next few months.
I think people will find that its incredibly compelling to move from a text comment or video comment to direct messages then to an audio / video call ... and then do payments.
Were at over half a billion monthly users, roughly half a billion posts per day, and over 100 billion impressions a day. These are monster numbers. Were seeing roughly a million new users sign up per day and an increase in the amount of time each user spends on the system. So, this is all good. If there is one goal, its to maximize unregretted user time on the system. Its not just maximize the time that people spend but maximize the unregretted time. Were making good progress on that front.
We also introduced the beginnings of recruiting, kind of like a LinkedIn competitor, essentially. If you are a company that is offering jobs or youre looking for jobs, this is going to be a good spot to find great people. Historically, Ive done a lot of recruiting on here.
LY: And weve talked about it a lot, right, Elon? Just that authentic filter and how hiring just naturally, organically, emerged. Ive actually been maybe a little surprised but really excited about our advertising partners [being] interested in X Hiring. Because youre right, LinkedIn is overdue for some competition. Because of the filtering nature and the authenticity of our platform, they know that theyve already started to explore that. So thats been a really interesting kind of new stream of conversation with customers.
EM: Frankly, I would place more emphasis on what somebody has posted in the past on the X platform than anything else. Have they posted interesting material? That would be probably the single biggest indicator for whether they are excellent and someone youd want to hire.
I think the same is true also on the romantic front. Finding someone on the platform. Obviously, I found someone and friends of mine have found people on the platform. And you can tell if youre a good match based on what they write. So
LY: So, X Dating around the corner then?
EM: Yeah. Theres already some stuff happening to some degree. But I think we might be able to improve the dating situation. Part of it is how do you discover interesting people? Discovery is tough.
LY: Next quarter, well do a livestream. You want to share some vision on any of your streaming visions for the future? Just overall content-wise, just how you see it?
EM: I think video livestreaming is going to be incredibly important for sporting events, for political events, for people who are actually on the spot. Instead of going through the lens of media, you can actually just have people who are literally at ground zero do a livestream or upload video. And so you actually can see whats happening in real time. My understanding is that it was actually quite helpful in Israel for helping people get to safety and highlight issues there.
I sort of approach this as like the collective consciousness
Theres really, I think, a profound shift in news. When you really think about information, I sort of approach this as like the collective consciousness, where if you can think of humanity as a superorganism and all the humans are basically the eyes and ears of the collective mind of humanity, you want to have all those eyes and ears feeding information into the collective mind. Not going through the slow and often distorted lens of media but actually just directly.
People who are actually in a particular industry or in a particular region actually know whats going on better than reporters do. Im not saying that reporters shouldnt write stuff, but how many reporters are there? And how many are actually on the ground? How many were really there versus [those who] read something on the internet or wrote an article? Its really some very tiny number of actual reporters. Most of them are not at the scene, and most of them are not industry experts. Whereas that is the case for X. People are on the scene. Theyre industry experts.
Weve got one of my favorite features, which is Community Notes, that is helpful to distinguish fact from fiction. Community Notes is completely open source, including the data. As I posted, sometimes I get either blamed or I get asked, Hey, can you take this Community Note down? Im like, thats actually not possible. I dont actually have that ability.
LY: Particular to your comments about people being force-fed certain types of media that have certain types of bias, I think we often underestimate peoples ability to seek out the real information and actually make the decisions for themselves.
LY: And thats the beauty of how this works, right? The power of the platform, right? To be able to seek out that information. Thats when Community Notes comes in to give you a little fact-check from people on the ground. And as weve seen, particularly in the last 20 days, how Community Notes has become so powerful, so meaningful, and now that you have so many new readers and contributors through Community Notes, and its quite a unique capability that X offers.
EM: Community Notes started off as Birdwatch. It existed before the acquisition, but it was in a very nascent form and just limited to, really, the US. I put a massive emphasis on this. This is something that we need to make a top priority at the company.
LY: Forty-four countries and over 100,000 contributors. Growth has been really just explosive. So its great.
EM: Im always amazed at the sort of batting average of Community Notes. Nothings perfect, but if a community note has been voted in and stays, the batting average is high 90s with accuracy. In fact, its the most accurate thing. If I want to know whats going on, Im going to look at the community note to figure out if its real or not.
LY: I think its really important to bring up because its one of the singular, most powerful pieces of feedback that we get, even from our biggest skeptics, is our approach to what were doing here that is completely transparent for all to see. When youre talking about Community Notes, I think, in the last 20 days, Ive probably posted five or six times about the evolution and the sophistication and maturation of Community Notes alone. But the way this company is innovating with complete transparency may invite some more of those skeptics. But like no other company in real time, tell them exactly whats going on. And its been really powerful, positive feedback.
Community Notes will be the single best source of truth on the internet, period.
EM: Community Notes is infinitely better than some sort of mysterious censorship bureau where nobody knows who they are or why they make decisions or anything. Thats the kind of thing that lends itself to manipulation of information. I want to be clear, Community Notes will be the single best source of truth on the internet, period.
I want to just go through the list quickly just to acknowledge the great work that has been done. We have picture in picture for videos on web. A ton of video features. Were rapidly reaching parity with YouTube and may exceed them. I test it with an occasional video game thats livestreamed, and were also synchronizing the live video and the stored video because they really should be the same thing. A video thats being uploaded or a video thats live with a delay are essentially the same thing. So were making sure the interface is going to be the same.
I also want to acknowledge those who have deleted code. My general philosophy on software is that you get one point for adding a line of code and two points for deleting. This is a really big deal. So thank you to everyone who has worked hard to simplify the code base and delete and simplify the software.
We are working toward money transmission licenses. Hopefully, those will come through in the next few months. Weve added ID verification, the ability to hide likes. We made it clear that we will support someone if their employer picks on them or fires them for what they post on the system. We will provide them with legal support.
Weve encrypted DMs, and thats also something that we will expand upon. The acid test for DMs, as with Signal, is that if somebody has a gun to my head, I still cant tell you what somebodys DMs are. Basically, they need to be definitively private or you really cant trust them. The team has done a lot to reduce child exploitation material. That has gone down dramatically, I think somewhere on the order of 90 percent-plus.
LY: Not to interrupt you, Elon, certainly. But it is one of the biggest areas of support we get from the partner groups or the interest groups that we work with specifically in this area of what it was like a year ago on the platform and our philosophy of zero tolerance on the platform now. So its something really important that we should celebrate.
EM: Totally. There are a ton more. Were also working to improve search dramatically. We want to have a semantic search. So if you type in search terms, it knows what you mean and then can bring up the text, pictures, and video that are what you mean. Not just strictly a text comparison. Were seeing the beginnings of that with the see similar posts capability. That is sort of an AI-based system.
Really, what we need to move toward is the entire system, all the recommended for you posts being AI-based. Essentially, you populate a vector space around the user and then any given post would also have a vector space. You correlate the two vector spaces, and you show people what is most likely interesting to them. And that will update all of the heuristics that we currently have.
We went through a similar process at Tesla with Full Self-Driving where it started off with almost entirely C++ code and then gradually became more and more a neural net. And now, the latest version of Full Self-Driving, called Rodeo, is entirely neural nets. I think thats going to be very compelling for the recommended feed. Its going to be a game-changer. And it will also mean that if somebody posts a very interesting reply, normally that is buried by default, that is buried with very little exposure, but sometimes the reply is more interesting than the original post. And we currently lose all that. With a purely AI-based system, whatever the reply is, if the reply is compelling, that will be shown more prominently than the original post if its compelling.
LY: Elon, can we talk a little bit about potential continuing efforts that we really are leading the marketplace in, in fighting spam and bots? Because when you look at our user and performance numbers, those are net of everything that weve done aggressively fighting the spam and bots.
EM: Yeah. Where things are today is that even generally available AI, very basic AI much less the sort of cutting-edge stuff, is easily able to overcome the various are you a human? tests. Like, solve this puzzle or tell me which of these pictures have a traffic light. AI is faster and better than people at identifying and passing these are you a human? tests. You dont even need to initially have bots.
You can have, you know, 100 people in a warehouse, each with 100 phones, that are all just going through the are you a human? tests because they are human, and they actually will also be way better than the average human because they do it all day. This is a really big deal, addressing the bots and trolls. Its important to avoid platform manipulation, where someone will spool up 100,000 bots or 100,000 fake accounts to make something seem more viral than it really is or to just spam users with crypto scams, or whatever the case may be. It essentially adds noise to the system and makes our platform less useful.
Advertisers should not find bots very appealing unless the bots are actually buying, which they wont
Its certainly possible if you turn a blind eye to bots for something to seem far busier than it really is. And so, there are other things that may seem incredibly busy, but theyre just really bots. But obviously, bots dont buy things, so advertisers should not find bots very appealing unless the bots are actually buying, which they wont. And then a bunch of the bots will be spam. That means there is bad content. Content that is not interesting. I regard bots and trolls as reducing the signal to noise of the collective mind that is the X platform.
LY: And safe to assume that the Not a Bot program will expand at the right time beyond Singapore and New Zealand, right?
EM: Yeah. Were running an experiment to see what the consequences would be if theres literally $1 a year, which is 0.3 cents per day. Sometimes, I get this absurd thing where its like, How will people in poor parts of the world afford? Im like, They are somehow on the internet. They have an electronic device, and they are on the internet, and a dollar a year is 0.3 cents a day. This is affordable for anyone, obviously.
My experience from X.com way back in the day X / PayPal was that the spammers and fraudsters are the ones who complain the loudest. Whenever some action was taken, it would get the most righteous indignation from the fraudsters because they dont like being shut down. So we expect the same thing here again. But we are being careful about this. Thats why we didnt just start worldwide. Just trying it out in the Philippines and New Zealand. So, well see how it goes [and] make some adjustments.
Even $1 a year, while obviously a tiny amount of money for anyone, any human, is still expensive if you want to do 100,000 bots. Now, you have to have $100,000 to get 100,000 bots, and you need 100,000 payment methods, which is even harder. We have to proceed carefully on that front.
LY: And when we think about the hiring business ready to be disrupted with X Hiring. Also when you think about the PR business with X Wires, [its] pretty exciting, too. Approaching something that I dont think many people ever have thought needs, you know, contemporizing, right?
EM: Yeah. Really, theres no need for PR Newswire. We are PR Newswire. How many individuals actually subscribe to PR Newswire? Basically no one. If you actually want to put out information as a company, were by far the best method of doing so. Thats obviously something we just need to highlight to companies. Corporations that have been around for a while do the same thing theyve been doing for a long time until we point out, Hey, theres a lower cost, easier way to do it, which is just put it on the platform. And thats what were going to do.
LY: I should get the numbers and the result because we just had two pretty nice size agencies merge: Camelot and PMG. They came to me the night before. I dont know if they had heard this weeks ago. They asked us to help them launch the announcement of the merging of the company. They experienced a response that was, you know, just 10x what they could ever imagine going from journalist to journalist or publication to publication to spread the word out. So I think were onto something.
EM: Sounds good. Cool. Yeah, forgive me if Im forgetting to mention because there are so many things that have been accomplished in a year. I think this is the fastest rate of innovation maybe ever for any internet company. Maybe X / PayPal back in the day was similar, but other than that, its certainly a faster rate of innovation for any mature company that has been around for a while by far.
LY: I think the rolling list of numbers is somewhere around 200 product innovations. Im not sure in most companies lifetimes or life cycles that they can talk about those. And even as, you know, consequential as the rollouts have been here, its just one year. And I think thats why because were pushing so much against legacy people are paying a lot of attention to what were doing.
EM: Indeed. The time to be concerned is not when, say, there are media stories about our company dying but when they dont bother to write the stories.
LY: Right. If they stopped writing about us, then we have become irrelevant. Or we always say weve become quite boring, and I dont think were boring. [Laughs]
The time to be concerned is not when, say, there are media stories about our company dying but when they dont bother to write the stories.
EM: Theres also longform content. We can do longform posts now with actually pretty good editing in the posts. Well be releasing the ability to have a very sophisticated text output comparable to what someone would do on some of the other platforms out there. Basically, complete rich text posting that [will let you] post a novel, basically, including an illustrated novel with video. Anyways, theres a ton. We are leaving out a few things. Thats a partial list of accomplishments. Theres a lot more to come in the future, obviously.
LY: Were all looking forward to that. There is no way any of this long, long list of accomplishments could have happened without the unconditional dedication of this team. Its one of the biggest things Ive experienced and am in awe of since I joined the company.
A company that was 8,000 [employees] has gone to a little under 1,500 and accomplished what we have accomplished. I think its pretty much writing a rule or a playbook that other companies should pay attention to. So thank you to everyone. Its incredible output.
EM: Super exciting. I look forward to doing the next one live on our platform.
LY: Thatll be next quarter. And we can talk about a lot more then. Alrighty.
EM: Are there any questions? Im happy to just keep going.
LY: Yeah, if we send them to Elon, well answer them.
EM: Just reply to my post.
LY: There was one question from someone I thought was interesting of what they havent heard about yet: what in your mind could come next thatll surprise everybody?
EM: I think payments and just generally being a financial hub is going to surprise people [with] just how powerful it is. I really understand this world, obviously. The X / PayPal product roadmap was written by myself and David Sacks, actually, in July of 2000. For some reason, once it became eBay, not only did they not implement the rest of the list but they actually rolled back a bunch of key features, which is crazy. PayPal is a less complete product than what we came up with in July of 2000, so 23 years ago.
When I say payments, I actually mean someones entire financial life.
When I say payments, I actually mean someones entire financial life. If it involves money, itll be on our platform money or securities or whatever. Its not just, you know, send 20 bucks to my friend. Im talking about, like, you wont need a bank account.
LY: And that we see coming full opportunity in 24, right?
EM: Oh, yeah. I mean, it would blow my mind if we dont have that rolled out by the end of next year.
LY: Someone asked me, which was interesting. Ill take a shot at it first, and maybe you riff on it a little bit. And it was, What is the one thing that we should stop doing in year two and one thing we should start doing in year two? And I thought about it. Everything weve talked about today. But for people who dont see our vision yet, people who dont see whats happening here at X, stop giving any of that oxygen. Dont pay attention to it. Heads down. See whats happening here and realize everything that were building here. So we make sure payments makes it, you know, actually as robust [an] offering as possible.
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Elon Musk shares X everything app plan in leaked all-hands - The Verge