In February, X did something that looked like a mistake: it took Grok, the AI feature driving subscriptions, and split it into its own app with its own paywall.
By December, it was clear why. X ended 2025 with its highest month of revenue ever, and the pair's combined growth tells a story about what's actually driving that success.
Here's December's check-in.
According to Appfigures Intelligence, users spent $29M on X via its mobile app in December, the highest month of revenue the app has ever seen!
December capped off a very good year for X: $289M in before-fee revenue, a 64% increase over 2024's haul and a 2,800% increase over 2022's revenue.
All of that while downloads dropped 13% for the year for a total of 104M, according to our estimates. That's not on X though, it's rather an industry-wide trend that's impacting many big apps.
While revenue was higher, the real acceleration wasn't happening at X. It was happening at Grok.
Before 2025, X's AI product, Grok, could only be accessed via X and could be unlocked further with an X subscription.
That has been a big contributor to X's revenue growth in 2024. Then, Grok got its own app and its own subscription system in February, and that shifted the growth.
So now you can use Grok as part of your X subscription and also as a standalone subscription, which is growing revenue for both.
Like X, Grok also ended 2025 with a bang. Appfigures Intelligence shows Grok earned $17M in December, up 17% from November.
Stacking the pair's revenue paints a different picture and confirms that X's revenue growth shifted to Grok. Together, the pair earned $46M in December, up 84% from the $25M of before-fee revenue X earned last December, before the Grok split.
I expect to see more cross-over between the two, and to see other social platforms follow suit. Meta is trying cautiously with Meta View. The downloads are growing, but it hasn't made headlines recently.
I'm sure 2026 will be a very interesting year for AI and social platforms.
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