X Money began reaching phones on this past June 25, when company executive Dhruv Batura, posting to his X account, informed a subset of US Premium+ subscribers. It was rolled out to Premium and Premium+ subscribers a month later, on July 27.
X Money is the resurrection of an old idea of Elon Musk’s. Being built in to a social-media platform, it is also an American blend of money and speech – a blend we speculated three years ago might just occur. Moreover, it is a fresh start after the past four years or so: time X has spent in a struggle with its advertisers.
Musk took over Twitter in 2022. Many companies didn’t like that and withdrew their advertising. Musk then told these companies what they could do with their ad spending and had X sue the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) in 2024, alleging a “systematic illegal boycott” (TechCrunch).
Sport to the rescue
A federal court dismissed that case in March 2026 for failing to show antitrust harm, and on July 29, four days after X Money’s limited rollout began, X dropped its appeal as part of a settlement with the WFA. The WFA in turn agreed not to revive the brand-safety body it wound down after the suit was filed (TechCrunch, Engadget). Both sides have called this a “reset.”
According to Monique Pintarelli, X’s global head of advertising, nearly all of the top hundred advertisers from 2022 are back – although the figure is unconfirmed and internal to X. Pintarelli credits X’s safety scores, which exceed 90 percent on every measurement the platform tracks. The returning brands have started with small outlays, and many of the first to return are in the business of sport (Digiday).
According to Sensor Tower’s numbers, as reported by Digiday, six of the original top hundred spent more on X in 2025 than in 2022.
The NFL was up 365 percent, Samsung 297 percent and the NBA 150 percent, with Dell, DraftKings and Chipotle also raising their expenditure. A further 64 were still advertising by 2025, at roughly half their 2022 spend on average, while Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Mondelez, PepsiCo, Comcast, IBM and Apple all cut back.
An eMarketer analyst has described X’s role in live sport as genuine and of long-standing but also, nowadays, as punctual. Business heats up around the Super Bowl and the World Cup but cools at other parts of the year.
And now, sport having helped it restore its fund of advertisers, X has performed a return of its own, introducing one new aspect of Musk’s dreamed everything app: payments.
The product
Users of X Money are issued a metal Visa debit card (bearing their X handle) and an interest-bearing wallet. They are permitted to make person-to-person transfers over Visa Direct, through a partnership X’s former CEO, Linda Yaccarino, announced in January 2025. Premium+ subscribers earn 6.00 percent APY outright. Premium subscribers earn 4.00 percent, which they can raise to 6.00 percent by making $1,000 or more in qualifying direct deposits (payroll, benefits, X Creator Payouts) within a trailing 34 days. Cashback runs at 3 percent on eligible card purchases, paid weekly (X Money terms).
Standard FDIC coverage tops out at $250,000 per depositor at deposit partner Cross River Bank. X itself advertises coverage up to $10 million, which it achieves through an opt-in sweep program that spreads deposits across partner banks. As X’s FAQ stipulates, there is no guarantee that the $250,000 ceiling will hold at any one bank. A balance exceeding the limit at a single bank falls outside of coverage. Instant withdrawals cost 1.75 percent of the transaction; a replacement metal card is free once, then $35.
TikTok Shop paired with Puma’s creator affiliate program produced a 737 percent revenue increase in one week around its Mayze trainer, and Sports Direct sold footballs “in their hundreds” on the platform during the Euros (TikTok Newsroom). Meanwhile, Nike’s Instagram account alone carries 291 million followers, and Snapchat says 215 million of its users watch sports content each month, with AR lenses built around the Olympics, the Super Bowl and the College Football Playoff (Snap).
By comparison with what TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are doing, X Money’s terms are table stakes. Nothing about them so far will entice a user to buy. But they do change things a bit for athletes.
Retailers and brands
X Money offers nothing unusual at checkout. It’s a Visa debit card, and any merchant that already takes Visa will take X Money too. Where this touches a brand’s operations is in athlete and creator payment.
Instant payouts through X Money remove the usual multi-day settlement lag for an agency paying a sponsored athlete through the platform. Those payouts, incidentally, count toward the deposit threshold that lifts a Premium subscriber’s yield from 4 to 6 percent. It’s a small benefit, but it’s real.
Linda Yaccarino said in June 2025 that creators would eventually be able to buy merchandise through the platform and predicted that “a whole commerce ecosystem” would form around it (Yahoo Finance). She left the company the following month, as X merged into Musk’s xAI in an all-stock deal, valued at $45bn (Mobile World Live). No succeeding executive at X has yet taken up the baton.
As things stand, X Money is a debit card that pays creators a little faster than usual. The overall platform’s recovery of advertisers is, so far, doing more for sport than its money app is.
