Entering 2026, X (Twitter) has been making frequent moves. While we can't see if anxiety is written on Musk's face, we can see Musk's anxiety written in his tweets.
And last weekend, X officially launched a "Million-Dollar Article Bounty Activity," sparking a wave of "long-form content fever" on the platform.
Currently, the most impactful article is from DAN KOE titled "How to Fix Your Life in 1 Day." This article has already garnered over 150 million reads and received a retweet from Musk.
It has been several years since Musk acquired X. Why is he now vigorously promoting X's creator ecosystem this year? In an era where global user reading habits are fragmented, why choose long-form content as the key focus? And can the revival of long-form content truly support Musk's ambition for an Everything App?
Musk's Anxiety
Every family has its own troubles; even geniuses have anxieties to face. The relentless pressure from competitors and X's own financial performance have made even the old Musk restless.
X is facing fierce competition in user growth and engagement, especially from Meta's Threads, which has seen rapid growth since its launch in 2023 and has already surpassed or closed in on X in several metrics.
According to the latest data released by analytics firm Similarweb in early January 2026, Threads' global mobile daily active users (DAU) have exceeded X's, averaging 143.2 million, compared to X's 126.2 million. In terms of growth trends, X's global DAU decreased by 11.9% year-over-year, while Threads achieved a staggering 37.8% growth. Even in X's home market, the United States, although X still leads with 21.2 million DAU compared to Threads' 19.5 million, the gap is narrowing rapidly, with the latter's annual growth rate reaching 41.8%, while X's fell by 18.4%.
Threads also performs excellently in monthly active users (MAU). As of January 2026, its MAU has reached 320 million, growing from 350 million to 400 million in 2025. In comparison, although X's MAU still has a scale of about 611 million, it has lost approximately 32 million users since Musk's acquisition. This shifting dynamic undoubtedly puts immense pressure on Musk.
The decline in user data directly impacts X's core revenue source—advertising. According to public data, X's global advertising revenue dropped to $2.5 billion in 2024, nearly halving from $4.4 billion in 2022. Although it is expected to rebound slightly to $2.26 billion in 2025, the overall downward trend remains evident, with some institutions predicting it will only recover to $2.7 billion by 2027.
Meanwhile, competitor Threads is highly favored by the capital markets. Analysts predict that Threads' advertising revenue could reach $11.3 billion in 2026, several times that of X's projected revenue. Although X achieved quarterly revenue growth at the end of 2025, the company as a whole remains in a loss-making state due to high restructuring costs.
Although subscription users (X Premium) saw significant growth in 2025, their revenue contribution is far below Musk's initial goal of "50% of total revenue." Therefore, X has directly linked the growth of Premium subscriptions to creator earnings, not only offering higher creator payouts but also explicitly basing the earnings calculation on paid user views (Verified Home Timeline impressions). This incentivizes creators to produce high-quality content that attracts paying users, thereby driving more users to subscribe to Premium services.
This ultimately led to the "Million-Dollar Article Bounty Activity" initiated by old Musk, akin to buying a千里马骨 (a metaphor for attracting talent with high rewards). Users in the Chinese region jokingly say that old Musk is running an American "New Concept Essay Competition" in 2026.
The Revival of Long-Form Content
Musk's choice to make long articles the breakthrough for X's creator ecosystem is not a whim but a deep strategic consideration based on X platform's positioning.
Currently, X's recommendation algorithm has a core metric—"regret-free user time," which is the total effective time users spend on a piece of content. Musk explicitly stated that this mechanism naturally favors long-form content because it can "accumulate more user seconds," thereby increasing the content's algorithmic weight and the platform's overall user engagement.
Long articles, by providing depth, context, and complete narratives, naturally extend user dwell time, contrasting sharply with the quick consumption mode of short posts or短视频. Recent algorithm updates have even introduced "content format weighting," explicitly favoring long-form content that requires more creative effort and has greater impact. This is not only an incentive for creators but also a data-driven decision: high-quality long articles can reduce user jumps to external links, keep users longer within the platform, and also provide more high-quality training data for Musk's AI project, Grok AI.
Musk has also repeatedly emphasized his hope to make X the "number one news source on Earth," replacing traditional media by aggregating "collective intelligence" in real-time. The long-form article feature allows users to publish "complete articles or even books," enabling domain experts, event witnesses, and deep creators to share their full insights directly on the platform, rather than fragmented information. At the same time, compared to the huge subsidies for short videos on other platforms, the incentive model for long articles is easier to commercialize through a subscription system, thereby attracting more professional journalists and writers back to the X platform.
However, a question arises. You might ask, given that global users' reading habits are now fragmented, why is old Musk pulling this "Renaissance" move?
It is undeniable that global users' digital reading habits are showing a clear trend towards fragmentation, especially under the impact of short video platforms. Gen Z and other younger groups prefer "fragmented" reading—multiple times a day for 5-10 minutes each time. However, data also shows that people's overall reading volume is actually increasing. As a counter-movement, "slow, immersive reading" is on the rise. Amid digital fatigue, people are beginning to seek depth, emotional connection, and meaningful content consumption.
What X wants is not to become another entertainment platform like TikTok, but to become a "life hub" deeply integrated into the daily life of every American, like WeChat—the "Everything App" that Musk keeps talking about. To achieve this, it is essential to极大地丰富 (greatly enrich) the platform's content and service ecosystem, increase users' "regret-free usage time," give them more reasons to stay on the platform, and complete more tasks here.
The Ambition for an Everything App
All of Musk's efforts ultimately point to a grand goal: to build X into an "Everything App" like WeChat. However, to realize this ambition, X still has a long way to go.
Compared to WeChat, X lags significantly in several key metrics. In terms of monthly active users (MAU), WeChat boasts over 1.4 billion users, while X has only 557 million, less than a third of the former. Such a huge user base gap makes it difficult for X to form the powerful "network effect" that WeChat has—where users cannot leave because all their friends, family, and life services are on the platform. WeChat has become a daily necessity for many, while X, in the eyes of most users, remains a social media platform for getting news and expressing opinions—still the old Twitter, that "American Weibo."
The gap in user stickiness is equally evident. The average daily usage time for WeChat users is as high as 82 minutes, while X users only spend 30-35 minutes. The reason behind this is that users can complete a large number of "productive" tasks within WeChat, such as chatting, payments, shopping, and accessing municipal services, while content consumption on X is still primarily passive browsing, which easily leads to "scroll and leave."
Old Musk doesn't want X to become TikTok, so he first needs to摆脱 (rid X of) the "scroll and leave" entertainment-oriented user experience. He needs high-quality, deep content to enhance user stickiness, attract and retain high-value users, and then, based on this content, gradually嫁接 (graft on) more services like payments and e-commerce, ultimately paving the way to the "Everything App."
And the grander this dream is, the deeper Musk's anxiety will be.
