From 15 failures to the realization of what TBH means: How Nikita Bier became an emotional manipulator of X

In mid-2025, a 36-year-old product manager named Nikita Bier joined X, under Elon Musk. Behind this seemingly routine personnel change lies a deeper story about products, human nature, and wealth. Bier’s background isn’t traditional—he developed 15 failed apps—but it was these failures that taught him a profound truth: what tbh really means. It’s more than just the name of an app; it signifies a fundamental understanding of human nature, a complete shift from rational to emotional drivers.

The Bankruptcy of Rationality: From Political Dreamer to Emotion Hunter

In 2012, while still studying at Berkeley, Nikita Bier was full of ideals and developed his first app, Politify. His simple goal was—to change American politics with data and logic.

The core of this app was a tax calculator. Users input their income and family info, and the app precisely calculated how different candidates’ tax policies would affect their actual take-home pay. Bier believed that once voters saw their economic interests clearly, they would make rational choices.

The results were surprising. With zero marketing budget, Politify attracted 4 million users during the 2012 election and topped the App Store download charts. But upon deeper analysis, Bier discovered a disheartening phenomenon: users who downloaded the app and saw their economic interests didn’t change their voting behavior. A blue-collar worker earning $30,000 a year, even knowing which candidate’s policies benefited him more, might still vote based on cultural identity.

At that moment, Bier’s rationalism collided with reality’s irrationality. Over five years, from 2012 to 2017, he tried repeatedly—developing one app after another, attempting to dissect human nature from different angles. Each failure revealed that he couldn’t attract or retain users.

But each failure also sharpened his understanding. He gradually realized that humans are driven not by reason and knowledge, but by primal desires—to be seen, recognized, and praised.

What Does tbh Mean: From Failure to Success

After 14 failed apps, in 2017, Bier created his 15th product, naming it tbh, an abbreviation for “To Be Honest.”

It was an anonymous social app with a very unique setup—users could anonymously vote for friends on questions like “Who is most likely to become president,” “Who is most likely to become a millionaire,” “Who is most likely to change the world.” The key was that all questions were positive, and all feedback was praise.

tbh represented a paradigm shift. It was no longer about Bier trying to persuade users with data; it was a pure emotion amplifier. Within two months, tbh attracted 5 million users, with 2.5 million daily active users. Starting from a high school in Georgia, it achieved viral growth among American high school students. In October 2017, Facebook acquired it for nearly $30 million.

What did this acquisition mean? For Bier, it signified the ultimate insight into human nature—praise could be monetized. The serious entrepreneur had disappeared, replaced by someone skilled at leveraging emotions.

From Facebook to Gas: The Evolution of Monetizing Emotions

While working at Facebook, Bier saw how the social giant used algorithms to generate controversy, predict behavior through data, and extend user engagement through product design. The most important lesson he learned: the essence of social platforms isn’t connecting people, but creating emotional fluctuations.

After leaving Facebook in 2021, Bier joined Lightspeed Venture Partners. The following year, he and his original team launched Gas—an evolved version of tbh. Gas added voting, gamification, and most critically, paid features: users could pay to see who praised them.

This new model’s business logic was straightforward—desire for praise is so strong that users are willing to pay to be seen. Within three months, Gas gained 10 million users, generated $11 million in revenue, and at one point surpassed TikTok and Meta to become the most popular app in the U.S. In January 2023, Discord acquired Gas for $50 million.

Why Does Elon Musk Need Such People?

In October 2022, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion and rebranded it as X. His vision was for X to evolve into a complete social and financial ecosystem. But to realize this, Musk needed to answer a key question: what kind of driver can naturally transition users from scrolling tweets to engaging in financial transactions?

Fundamentally, this is a human nature question.

Bier’s connection with Musk began with a bold self-application. When Musk announced the Twitter acquisition, Bier tweeted on X: “@elonmusk Hire me to run Twitter as VP of Product.” No response at first, but Bier didn’t give up. Over the next three years, he continued sharing deep insights on product growth, user psychology, and social networks on X.

By June 2025, when X needed a product leader to integrate social and financial features, Musk thought of Bier. When he announced his joining, Bier wrote: “I’ve officially posted my way to the top,” perfectly embodying his core philosophy—impact equals wealth, posting equals promotion.

Before joining X, Bier also served as an advisor to the Solana Foundation, overseeing its mobile strategy. This experience gave him firsthand insight into how crypto can leverage social dynamics for viral growth. He understood an important insight: influence has become a tradable, quantifiable financial asset.

The Financialization of X: From Social to Trading

After joining X, Bier quickly launched a series of product adjustments. He collaborated with the algorithm team to redesign the recommendation feed, increasing content from friends, mutual follows, and fans, re-centering social relationships in content distribution.

More critically, he announced the upcoming launch of Smart Cashtags. When users mention stocks or cryptocurrencies in tweets, X would automatically display real-time prices, price changes, and related discussions. This signaled a shift—X was transforming from a simple social platform into a real-time financial information hub.

Simultaneously, Bier revised X’s developer API policies, restricting apps that incentivize posting and upgrading creator monetization programs. In January 2026, a long article by American creator Dan Koe titled “How to Fix Your Entire Life in One Day” received 150 million reads and 260,000 likes within a week, becoming X’s most-read long-form post.

This wasn’t coincidence but a carefully designed demonstration. By promoting high-quality long content to hundreds of millions, he sent a signal: if your content is good enough, X’s algorithm will amplify it. This strategy is smarter than direct monetary incentives—it heals creators’ fear of content “drowning in the sea.”

According to a Financial Times report in November 2025, X is developing in-app trading and investment features, allowing users to buy stocks and cryptocurrencies directly on X. CEO Linda Yaccarino revealed that Visa would be the first partner for XMoney accounts. By December 2025, X Payments had obtained money transfer licenses in 38 U.S. states, covering about 75% of the U.S. population.

In interviews, Bier explained the core logic: “Consumers don’t choose products because of functional differences but because of emotional resonance.” In other words, X’s financialization isn’t about offering better financial services but capturing emotional fluctuations and converting them into transactions during moments of high emotion.

The Financial Anxiety of Generation Z and X’s Opportunity

This model works especially well among certain demographics. A July 2025 survey by the American Bankers Association found that 72% of young people changed their lifestyles due to rising living costs, and 33% of Gen Z feel deep financial pressure, over half blaming economic instability. A study by Ernst & Young emphasized that financial issues are the main source of anxiety for Gen Z. Arta Finance’s 2024 report further noted that financial stress has pushed 38% of Gen Z and 36% of Millennials into early midlife crises.

This generation’s financial situation is indeed worrying. BuzzFeed once reported on Hayley, a 27-year-old working at a veterinary clinic in northern Colorado, earning $17 an hour, with only 33 hours scheduled weekly. Monthly expenses included $600 rent, $400 car loan, $150 insurance, $50 utilities, $70 phone, $100 student loans, $50 minimum credit card payments—totaling $1,420.

Hayley said, “Every expense comes with guilt—I always feel like this money should be saved. If my financial black hole isn’t plugged, I can’t feel at peace.” Her story is a microcosm of an entire generation.

In this context, what does X’s financialization mean? It means capturing Gen Z’s financial anxiety and providing a frictionless investment entry point. Users don’t need to download complex trading apps, fill out lengthy forms, or verify identities. They just see a trending stock or crypto while scrolling and tap to buy—investing becomes as easy as a click.

According to CFA Institute research, 31% of Gen Z started investing before age 18, 54% get investment info from social media, 44% hold cryptocurrencies, with crypto making up about 20% of their portfolios. For this generation, social media isn’t just information; it’s a place for investment decisions. They distrust traditional finance and trust social media influencers and their own instincts. X is becoming the amplifier of that intuition.

The Curse of Super Apps

But before Musk and Bier, countless tech giants attempted to build super apps, with no success.

Once, BlackBerry and its BBM messaging service nearly achieved super app status. Executives planned to layer payments and services on top of social. But a series of missteps led BlackBerry to decline sharply, shrinking from 20% market share in 2013 to less than 1%.

Amazon’s Fire Phone also failed. In 2014, Bezos envisioned merging e-commerce and social, but the Fire Phone quickly flopped, costing Amazon $170 million in write-downs.

Analyzing these cases, three main reasons explain why super apps struggle in the West: first, users prefer specialized, independent apps—small business owners use Shopify for commerce, QuickBooks for accounting, Slack for collaboration. All-in-one solutions are often seen as mediocre.

Second, strict regulations and privacy red lines act as barriers. Super apps require massive data integration, but privacy laws in Europe and the U.S. limit data sharing, raising social concerns and compliance costs.

Third, the mature market’s dominant players—Google, Amazon, Apple—have already secured their ecosystems. New entrants face not only feature competition but also entrenched user loyalty.

So, can X succeed where others failed? It has advantages: 550 million active users, ample funding, and political resources to navigate regulation. Most importantly, X isn’t building from scratch but gradually adding financial features onto its existing base. This incremental approach reduces user friction.

But resistance remains. U.S. users are accustomed to Venmo transfers and Robinhood trading—why switch to X?

That’s the core challenge Bier must solve. His strategy is to seamlessly embed financial transactions into daily social behavior. Not asking users to “do business,” but to buy stocks or crypto while scrolling. When social and trading are just two buttons in the same interface, switching costs are nearly zero.

However, this seamless experience raises new concerns. When social and financial are intertwined, will users’ emotional swings be directly translated into trades? Could this emotional trading exacerbate market irrationality? Might users make poor decisions during high emotions? Could it attract regulatory scrutiny? These questions remain unanswered.

The Age of Emotion and Wealth Anxiety

Over the past decade, social media has evolved from “connecting people” to “manufacturing emotions.” The attention economy shifted from “content is king” to “emotion is king.” Wealth distribution moved from “capital is king” to “influence is king.”

Nikita Bier’s career epitomizes this shift. From an entrepreneur trying to rationally change the world, he has transformed into a master of emotional harvesting. This isn’t just personal choice—it’s an era-driven trend.

In an age of information overload and scarce attention, reason yields to emotion, logic yields to intuition, and long-term yields to short-term. Whoever can generate emotion gains attention; attention leads to influence; influence translates into wealth.

In this new era, everyone becomes a product. Our likes, comments, shares are captured by algorithms, analyzed by data, and amplified by emotions. Our attention, feelings, influence are converted into liquidity, wealth, and power.

In this context, what tbh signifies is less important than what the pattern represented by Bier and Musk signifies. It signals an impending future driven by emotion—a new world where influence becomes a hard currency. How we find our place in this world? The answer may be gradually approaching us through social platforms, via algorithmic recommendations.