More change is coming at X. The platform’s Head of Product Nikita Bier announced on Wednesday that he’s stepping down after just over a year.
Bier, who came to X after building two successful social engagement apps of his own, told users in an X post that although he’s leaving his current position, he will stay on as an advisor.
As per Bier: “Serving the X community has been the privilege of a lifetime. X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history. But running this app is a 24/7 job and it's now time for me to take a breather.”
Over the past year, Bier has become the public voice of the app. Bier’s personal X account has often been the only communications channel sharing updates on app development.
Bier said that in his time at X, the platform has seen “unprecedented growth in new users & engagement,” and that it breaks records every month.
“We've climbed 70 spots in the App Store since this time last year,” Bier said. “And in the last 400 days, we rebuilt almost every aspect of X: the Timeline, the Android app, onboarding, notifications, chat and more. We also launched nearly 30 new products while protecting the integrity of the town square: becoming the first app to show Country-of-Origin on profiles and mounting defenses against AI bots.”
However, Bier’s growth claims haven’t always been reflected in X’s official reported numbers.
In February, a week after X owner Elon Musk said the app was seeing record-high usage, X’s own EU DSA disclosure report showed that X usage in Europe had actually declined by 15% in the second half of 2025.
In January, Bier shared a chart showing that average time spent daily on X was hitting new records almost every day.
Yet, when questioned about the numbers behind the chart, Bier said the figures were not representative of all users, but instead showed “attested iOS devices who authenticate with a phone number on a major carrier.”
As part of the SpaceX prospectus published in May, X’s parent company reported that the app had reached 550 million monthly active users as of March 2026, representing significant growth on the 520 million MAU seen in December 2025. However, in May 2024, Musk said X had reached 600 million MAU, a number that he and Bier have repeatedly referenced in their updates.
Given the variances in X’s selective reporting and the actual usage stats the platform has published in official, auditable formats, it seems that X hasn’t actually seen the growth momentum that Bier and Musk have claimed.
Even so, Bier has played a role in improving several elements of the app, including its incentive structure for creator monetization, as well as its efforts to reduce the presence of bots and spam.
The question, then, is why is Bier leaving? If X is seeing such significant success, with Bier being the public voice of that, why would he be moving on? And wouldn’t Musk be looking to pay more to keep him around?
Maybe X is on the verge of another big shift, or maybe bad news is on the horizon and Bier is getting out before it hits.
