Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk says X will launch a standalone “X Chat” in the coming months while Chat becomes embedded in X, adding that its peer-to-peer encryption approach is “similar to Bitcoin” and that the system avoids ad hooks.
Speaking on Friday’s “Joe Rogan Experience,” Musk said X has “rebuilt the entire messaging stack” since X Chat and argued that security should be seen in “degrees of uncertainty,” not as a binary. He described a peer-to-peer model and said the goal is to make Chat “the least insecure” among messaging apps. He added that encryption is “very good” and undergoes thorough testing.
Musk tied his security pitch to business design. He said rival messengers introduce risk when they include “hooks for advertising” and argued that any avenue used to target ads could become an opportunity to read messages if misused. He said that X Chat will not include such hooks.
The distribution will be double-tracked. “We want both,” Musk said, noting a dedicated app targeted “in a few months,” along with the integrated experience inside X. In either version, users should be able to send text, share files, and make audio or video calls when the full feature set lands.
The current status is more modest. Inside X today, Chat serves as an upgraded replacement for legacy direct messages and is in beta for Premium subscribers. In-app chat supports text, images, media attachments, GIFs, and file sharing attached to X handles instead of phone numbers. Audio and video calling were cited by Musk as part of the plan, but do not appear in the current version of the X.
Musk’s framing centers around two ideas: keep content end-to-end encrypted and limit what the service needs to know by removing ad targeting logic. Mainstream messengers often encrypt message content but retain metadata such as counterparties and timestamps; his view is that reducing reliance on advertising narrows the attack surface.
