Last week, Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, declared that his top priority was fixing the platform’s creator program. Bier, like Instagram’s Adam Mosseri and YouTube’s Tiffany Matloob, had zeroed in on a growing issue that threatens social media’s value as a whole: the slop-maximizing explosion of so-called aggregator accounts, which upload endless clips and ripped-off videos and repost engagement bait to scam ad revenue payouts. As Bier said, “If we don’t fix this, X will become a media property composed of 50 accounts, instead of a social network.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by X’s most prominent power users. Earlier this month, All-In co-host Jason Calacanis tweeted that “every monetized account should be audited for original content vs. stolen content, and be bounced from the program.” On the web, he noted, “incentives matter and X should only reward the original creators.”

This is partly a problem of Musk’s own creation. In 2024, he tweaked X’s algorithm to make it a “video-first” platform—aggressively deprioritizing the external links that had once made Twitter the nerve center of the news industry and a traffic firehose for publishers. Practically overnight, thousands of paid accounts pivoted their strategies for maximizing engagement. And on some level, it worked. Musk and Bier didn’t want X to be Twitter—they wanted to compete with TikTok, Instagram, and even YouTube. In January, X’s executive team declared 2026 “the year of the creator.” A few weeks later, the company rolled out subscriber-only posts—a direct shot at Substack’s business model, too.

No, Bari Weiss or Meredith Kopit Levien probably don’t need to worry about talent absconding to X. But it does mean that some journalists may want to start thinking differently about the platform. Simply turning on monetization, which allows accounts with large followings to collect monthly payouts based on their views, could encourage publishing more analysis—and scoops—on X first. Meanwhile, the platform’s revenue-sharing program for shortform video may move some journalists away from YouTube or TikTok, where they’re still building their followings, to X, where those followings already exist.

Musk and Bier’s attempt to morph X from a place where people post for fun to a platform where creators post for profit hasn’t come without controversy. Author and content creator Dan Koe went semi-viral in January after posting about his meager $4,500 payout for a very lengthy post that allegedly amassed some 100 million impressions. Another creator, Tim Pool, whose political leanings are in line with X’s right-wing shift and who has more than 2.6 million followers, has posted screenshots of payments totaling more than $175,000—or enough to “buy a house,” as he said. Musk has repeatedly said that his goal with X has been to return the platform to a politically neutral town square, but multiple studies have shown that right-wing content has been amplified since his takeover.

Musk’s platform also benefits from a content era that’s moved away from exclusivity at all costs. It’s why Musk pushed Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson to start uploading full videos to X; why Marc Andreessen launched Monitor the Situation directly on X (the home of a large swath of the global A.I. conversation); and why people like Bill Ackman are writing 5,000-word essays on the platform while simultaneously maintaining Substack accounts. In short, the more content that X supports from advertiser-friendly creators, the more it becomes a true media company rather than a tech aggregator. Perhaps most importantly, it creates more ingestion opportunities to train Grok.

On some level, Elon’s ambitions are bigger than his terrestrial competitors’. Buried in the I.P.O. prospectus for SpaceX, which owns X and xAI, are the blueprints for a master plan for a vertically integrated media empire—one that combines on-platform content creation and a walled-garden distribution platform with both satellite internet services (Starlink) and native A.I. tools (Grok). It’s a vision for a complete content flywheel that no single media company, carrier, or A.I. lab has attempted at scale.

In a new twist on the term, X and xAI have formed a model training flywheel, too. According to SpaceX’s S-1 filing, the Grok-powered Imagine (think Sora, but for X) generated about 2 billion A.I. videos per month, and is continuously trained off real-time posts made available through X’s firehose. It’s a critical moment for xAI and Grok: Traffic has plummeted over the last 45 days, per recent data published by SimilarWeb, at the same time that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have seen their share of A.I. usage increase. Between January 1 and April 21, Grok was recording about 10.3 million visits a day, per SimilarWeb; then, between April 22 and May 21, traffic dropped by nearly 25 percent, largely due to the quiet rollout of Grok 4.3 in mid-April, which experienced various glitches from high demand. Traffic has yet to recover.

The solution is straightforward, even if executing it isn’t. Musk needs to incentivize the right creators to post more substantial content on X through stronger revenue-sharing and direct-to-follower membership opportunities, while simultaneously purging or demonetizing the spam accounts that rip them off. Better content trains Grok; a better Grok builds better creator tools; and better tools attract bigger names, which draw in the advertisers and subscribers who fund the whole thing. Packaged within the Starlink distribution system, X and Grok could become an entry point for the entire internet, not just another app on your phone.

There are plenty of problems that Bier and Musk will have to figure out. Random people on X using these tools have already created headaches: For a time, Grok was hijacked into generating lewd reimaginings of women—including young girls—which led foreign governments to demand Musk fix the issue or shut down operations in their countries. (X committed to working with local authorities, enforcing stricter policies, and cracking down on accounts violating the company’s terms of use.)

There’s also a class of X power users, like journalists, who may not want financial ties to a company owned by a famously partisan gasbag. But Musk’s biggest advantage is that we’ve entered a golden age of free agency for creators. Any platform that pays out is one that every creator, niche or mainstream, wants to prioritize. Elon doesn’t need X to be the biggest creator platform—he just needs people to treat it as a destination rather than an afterthought.