Written by: Sleepy.txt
On June 30, 2025, X welcomed a young product leader. His name is Nikita Bier, 36 years old. Before joining Musk's ranks, he had repeatedly turned the social apps he developed into blockbusters, selling them to tech giants for tens of millions of dollars.
After acquiring Twitter, Musk has been obsessed with transforming it into a super app, integrating social networking, payments, investments, and banking. However, this path is littered with failures, as numerous tech giants have had similar dreams, and none have succeeded.
Against this backdrop, Nikita Bier's appointment appears particularly意味深长 (meaningful/significant).
In the six months since taking office, Bier collaborated with the algorithm team to adjust the recommendation feed, increasing the proportion of content from friends, mutual follows, and followers. This changed X's content distribution logic, placing users' social relationships back at the core of content distribution.
Recently, Bier announced the upcoming launch of the Smart Cashtags feature. Users can mention stock or cryptocurrency tickers in their posts, and X will automatically display real-time prices, percentage changes, and related discussions. This feature transforms X from a mere social platform into a real-time financial information platform. Users no longer need to leave X to check stock prices or switch between multiple apps; all information is presented on a single interface.
And on January 16th, he revised X's developer API policy, no longer allowing InfoFi-type applications that reward users for posting, and directly revoked the API access permissions for these apps. Simultaneously, he is pushing for an upgrade to X's creator incentive program.
These reforms seem scattered but actually point to a core goal: transforming X from a social platform into a massive ecosystem that integrates social interaction, influence, and finance.
The Birth of a Dopamine Dealer
In 2012, Nikita Bier was a student at UC Berkeley. That year, he developed an app called Politify, attempting to intervene in American politics using data and logic.
Politify's core feature was a tax calculator. Users input their income and family status, and the app calculated the actual impact of different candidates' tax policies on them. Bier believed that if voters could clearly see their economic interests, they would make more rational choices.
This idea achieved great success during the 2012 election. Politify attracted 4 million users with zero marketing budget, once topping the App Store download charts. Bier then believed that information asymmetry in voter decision-making was the root of social problems, and his product could solve this.
But reality soon gave him a hard lesson. Bier found that although users downloaded Politify and saw their economic interests, they did not change their voting choices. A blue-collar worker earning $30,000 a year, even knowing one candidate's tax policy was more beneficial, might vote for another candidate due to cultural identity.
This made Bier realize that data and logic cannot defeat emotional resonance. So, from 2012 to 2017, Bier entered a frenzied trial-and-error mode. According to Startup Archive reports, after Politify, he and his team developed over a dozen apps, attempting to deconstruct human nature from different angles, but none succeeded. The results were either an inability to gain users or an inability to retain them.
However, each failure gave Bier a deeper understanding of human nature. He began to realize that humanity's most primal desires are not rationality, knowledge, or efficiency, but being seen, recognized, and praised.
By 2017, they completed their 15th product, tbh (To Be Honest).
This was an anonymous social app where users could vote for friends anonymously, choosing "who is most likely to become president," "who is most likely to become a millionaire," "who is most likely to save the world," etc. All questions were positive, all feedback was praise.
tbh attracted 5 million users within two months, with daily active users reaching 2.5 million at one point. It started in a high school in Georgia and quickly achieved viral growth among American high school students. In October 2017, Facebook acquired tbh for less than $30 million.
The success of tbh marked Bier's shift from trying to persuade users with data to driving users with emotion. He no longer tried to solve social problems but instead used human weaknesses to create addictive products. Thus, the serious entrepreneur disappeared, replaced by a smooth dopamine dealer.
Musk's Choice
In October 2017, Nikita Bier joined Facebook with his team, becoming a product manager.
Internally at Facebook, Bier once shared tbh's growth strategy with colleagues. According to internal Facebook documents obtained by BuzzFeed News in August 2018, Bier's team detailed how they used Instagram's mechanisms for rapid growth.
The core of this strategy was leveraging teenagers' curiosity and herd mentality. Bier's team would create private accounts on Instagram, follow all students at a target high school, and write teaser copy in the account bio, such as "You've been invited to join a mysterious app—stay tuned!"
Students, out of curiosity, would request to follow this account. Bier's team would then wait 24 hours to collect all follow requests, then set the account to public at 4 PM, right after school, and add the App Store link to the bio.
Instagram would simultaneously notify all students that their follow requests had been accepted. Students would see the notification, visit the account, see the download link, and download the app.
Although this strategy was unorthodox, it demonstrated Bier's precise grasp of human nature. If you want users to take action, you don't need to persuade them; you just need to create an emotional trigger they can't resist.
Less than a year after the acquisition, Facebook shut down tbh due to "low usage." But Bier chose to stay at Facebook, continuing as a product manager.
During this time, Bier gained deep insight into the operational mechanisms and internal politics of large social platforms. He saw how Facebook used algorithmic recommendations to create controversy, used data analysis to predict user behavior, and used product design to extend user dwell time.
The most important lesson he learned at Facebook was that social platforms are not for connecting people but for creating emotional fluctuations. The greater the emotional fluctuation, the longer the user dwell time, and the higher the ad revenue.
In 2021, Bier left Facebook and joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a Product Growth Partner. In 2022, he and the original team launched Gas, an upgraded version of tbh. Gas added voting, gamification, and paid features; users could pay to see who praised them.
Gas attracted 10 million users in three months, generating $11 million in revenue, and once surpassed TikTok and Meta to become the most popular app in the US. In January 2023, Discord acquired Gas for $50 million.
The success of Gas validated another key insight for Bier: the human craving for praise can be monetized. If you can create an environment where users crave to be seen and recognized, and then set a paywall at the critical moment, users will not hesitate to pay.
This insight was exactly what Musk needed.
In October 2022, Musk spent $44 billion to take over Twitter, renaming it X. In his blueprint, X would evolve into the ultimate closed loop integrating social and financial activities. But to realize this dream, Musk had to solve a key problem: how to dissolve the psychological boundaries of users, allowing them to naturally conduct financial transactions while socializing on the platform.
This is still a question about human nature. What driving force can make users overcome the psychological barrier of conducting transactions, investing, and saving on a social platform.
Bier's connection with Musk began with a bold self-recommendation. When Musk announced the acquisition of Twitter, Bier posted on X: "@elonmusk Hire me to run Twitter as VP of Product". This tweet received no response at the time, but Bier did not give up.
Over the next three years, he continued to post on X, sharing deep thoughts on product growth, user psychology, and social networks. His tweets gradually accumulated significant influence and allowed Musk to see his profound understanding of products and human nature.
So, by June 2025, when X needed a product leader capable of merging social and finance, Musk thought of Bier. Announcing his joining, Bier wrote: "I've officially posted my way to the top," and replied to his 2022 self-recommendation tweet: "Never give up".
This story itself is the best illustration of Bier's belief that "influence is currency."
Before joining X, Bier also served as an advisor to the Solana Foundation, managing their mobile strategy. During this experience, he witnessed firsthand how cryptocurrencies achieved viral growth through social power, realizing that influence itself had become a financial asset that could be priced and traded.
Musk's interest in Bier stemmed from his first-principles thinking: the essence of finance is not technology, but trust and emotion. You must know how to use the lever of emotion effectively.
And Bier is an expert in this area.
His series of actions at X are essentially extreme manipulations of the emotional lever. Take his reform of X's creator incentives as an example. Bier深知 (knows deeply) that for a platform to continuously produce quality content, it must address creators' core anxieties.
So, in the places we can all observe, he upgraded X's creator incentive program, allowing creators to receive more money each cycle; but in the places we cannot see, he is actually manipulating the algorithm to create stars.
In January 2026, renowned American creator Dan Koe published a long post on X titled "How to Fix Your Entire Life in One Day." This article garnered 150 million reads and 260,000 likes in one week, becoming the most-read long-form post in X's history.
This was Bier's demonstration case. By pushing a deep long-form article to hundreds of millions of impressions, Bier sent a clear signal to all creators, especially those hesitant about investing in deep content on X: if your content is high-quality enough, X's algorithm will help you spread it.
This is a strategy more sophisticated than direct monetary incentives. It cures creators' fear of their content sinking without a trace. Dan Koe's case makes them believe that on X, deep thinking and quality content can be discovered and amplified by the platform.
This strategy is consistent with the psychological techniques Bier used in tbh and Gas. He洞察到 (insightfully recognized) that for creators, what they need is to be seen and recognized. By setting an exposure benchmark, Bier precisely leveraged the participation enthusiasm of the creator community, attracting more quality content to flood into the platform, thus forming a positive ecological cycle.
Gen Z's Wealth Anxiety
This grasp of human nature allows Bier to repeatedly and accurately hit the pain points of his target audience. In finance, Bier faces a young generation repeatedly tormented by financial anxiety.
In October 2024, BuzzFeed published an article titled "This Woman Reveals How She Deals With Financial Anxiety In Her 20s." The protagonist was 27-year-old Hayley, living in northern Colorado, working as a front desk receptionist at an animal clinic, earning $17 per hour.
She could only get scheduled for 33 hours per week. Her monthly fixed expenses included: $600 for rent, $400 for car loan, $150 for car insurance, $50 for electricity, $70 for phone bill, $100 for student loan, $50 minimum credit card payment, totaling $1420. Although she set aside $50 as pocket money every time she got paid, this money was quickly spent.
Hayley said: "Every expense comes with guilt; I always feel this money should have been saved. As long as this financial black hole isn't filled, I can't gain that underlying sense of security that allows me to feel at ease. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is so right. I hate this society; it forces people to survive but deprives them of the room to live."
Hayley's story is an epitome of an entire generation.
According to a Bank of America survey in July 2025, 72% of young people have changed their living habits due to rising living costs, 33% of Gen Z feel deep financial pressure, and over half attribute it to economic instability.
EY research also emphasized that financial issues are the primary factor causing anxiety for Gen Z. And Arta Finance's 2024 report showed that financial stress has even led 38% of Gen Z and 36% of Millennials to enter a midlife crisis prematurely.
This anxiety has become the fuel for X's financial expansion.
After joining X, Nikita Bier quickly initiated a series of product adjustments mentioned at the beginning of the article. But Bier's real ambition is not just to make X a financial information platform; he wants to make X a financial trading platform.
According to a Financial Times report in November 2025, X is developing in-app trading and investment features, allowing users to directly purchase stocks and cryptocurrencies on X. X's CEO Linda Yaccarino revealed that Visa would be the first partner for XMoney accounts. As of December 2025, X Payments had obtained money transmitter licenses in 38 US states, covering about 75% of the US population.
On X, every like, every comment, every repost is an expression of user emotion. Bier's task is to transform this emotional data into financial signals. If a user frequently likes tweets about a certain stock, X can infer their interest in that stock and push a purchase link at an opportune moment.
If a user frequently comments on tweets about cryptocurrency, X can infer they are a potential cryptocurrency investor and push related investment products.
This is an emotion-based financial service. It doesn't require users to actively search, fill out complex forms, or undergo cumbersome verification. It only needs to capture users' emotional fluctuations and then, at the moment of heightened emotion, provide a simple transaction entry point.
Bier said in an interview: "Consumers don't choose to use a product because of a functional gap, but because of the emotional resonance they can generate while using the product."
Similarly, the core logic of X's financialization is not to provide better financial services, but to capture user emotions and then, at the moment of heightened emotion, convert that emotion into a transaction.
This model is particularly effective among Gen Z. According to a CFA Institute research report, 31% of Gen Z started investing before age 18, 54% of Gen Z investors obtain investment information through social media, 44% of Gen Z investors hold cryptocurrencies, with cryptocurrencies making up an average of 20% of their investment portfolios.
For this generation, social media is not only a channel for obtaining information but also a place for making investment decisions. They don't trust traditional financial institutions and Wall Street analysts; they trust KOLs on social media, their own emotions, and intuition. And X is precisely the amplifier of these emotions and intuitions.
The Curse of Super Apps
However, before Musk and Bier, countless giants have tried to build super apps, and they all failed.
As the former mobile霸主 (dominant player), BlackBerry and its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) were once just one step away from becoming a super app. Executives had ambitious plans to overlay payments and services on top of social networking, attempting to build a digital empire for that era.
But reality was extremely harsh. A series of decision-making errors caused BlackBerry to lose ground in the competition. By 2013, its former 20% market share had shrunk to less than 1%, and that grand imperial dream ultimately ended in failure.
BlackBerry's failure is not an isolated case. Amazon's attempt also ended in failure. In 2014, the Fire Phone, carrying Bezos's grand vision of unifying e-commerce and social networking, was launched with great fanfare but quickly溃败 (collapsed) in a short time. This attempt not only cost Amazon a $170 million write-down but also became a major failure in Bezos's business career.
Reviewing these cases, we can归纳出 (summarize) three reasons why super apps haven't succeeded in the West.
First, highly specialized user habits. European and American users prefer dedicated standalone apps. A small business owner often relies on Shopify for transactions, QuickBooks for accounting, and Slack for collaboration. In their eyes, all-in-one often means mediocre; super apps find it difficult to challenge the kings of these niche sectors in terms of professional depth.
Second, stringent regulatory barriers and privacy red lines. The essence of a super app is data hegemony, and privacy protection is a死穴 (fatal point) for Western regulators. Integrating massive amounts of data on a single platform brings huge social concerns and causes compliance costs and leakage risks to rise exponentially.
Finally, an already solidified巨头格局 (giant landscape). Mature markets have no vacuum. Google, Amazon, and Apple have already divided up users' digital lives. A new super app must not only face functional competition but also challenge users' brand loyalty to existing ecosystems.
So, can X succeed where predecessors failed?
X's advantages are obvious. It has 550 million active users by default, and Musk has enough money and political resources to tackle regulatory challenges. Most crucially, X isn't building from scratch but is gradually adding financial functions on top of its existing foundation.
This approach of moving fast with small steps saves users the hassle. No need to download anything or relearn operations; just click one more button in the familiar interface, and social and financial activities are connected.
But X's resistance is actually significant. American users are already accustomed to using Venmo for transfers, Robinhood for trading stocks and crypto. These professional apps work well; why switch to X?
This is the problem Nikita Bier needs to solve. His strategy is to integrate financial transactions into users' daily social behaviors. He isn't begging you to "do business" on X but lets you顺手 (conveniently) buy a stock or a coin while scrolling through tweets. This seamless experience is the key to whether X can succeed this time.
But this seamless experience also brings a new problem. When social and financial activities merge, users' emotional fluctuations will be directly converted into financial transactions. Will this model exacerbate irrational exuberance in the market? Will it lead users to make wrong investment decisions when emotionally charged? Will this attract more regulatory trouble?
This question currently has no answer.
The Alchemy of Emotion
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the transformation of social media from "connecting people" to "manufacturing emotion." We have witnessed the attention economy shift from "content is king" to "emotion is king." We have witnessed wealth distribution change from "capital is king" to "influence is king."
Nikita Bier's career is a microcosm of this transformation. He went from an entrepreneur trying to change the world with rationality to a dopamine dealer harvesting users by leveraging emotion.
This transformation is actually an inevitability of the era. In an age of information overload and scarce attention, rationality gives way to emotion, logic gives way to intuition, and the long-term gives way to the short-term. In this era, those who can manufacture emotion gain attention; those who gain attention gain influence; those who gain influence gain wealth.
This is a全新的时代 (brand new era), an emotion-driven era, an era where influence equals wealth.
In this era, each of us is Nikita Bier's product. Our likes, comments, and reposts are being captured by algorithms, analyzed by data, and amplified by emotion. Our attention, our emotions, our influence are being converted into liquidity, wealth, and power.
In this era, emotion is the most powerful weapon and also the most dangerous poison.
