Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Space
Speaking at Friday’s “Joe Rogan Experience,” Musk said X had “rebuilt the entire messaging stack” as X Chat and argued that security should be viewed in “degrees of insecurity,” not a binary. He described a peer-to-peer model and said the goal is to make Chat “the least secure” among messaging apps. He added that the encryption is “very good” and is being tested extensively.
Musk tied his security talk to business design. He said competing messengers introduce risk when they include “advertising hooks”, arguing that any avenue used to target ads could become a way to read messages if abused. He stated that X Chat would not include such hooks.
Distribution will be double track. “We’ll have both,” Musk said, pointing to a targeted dedicated app “in a few months,” alongside the built-in experience in X. In both versions, users should be able to text, share files, and make audio or video calls once the full feature set is available.
The current situation is more modest. Today in X, Chat functions as an enhanced replacement for legacy Direct Messages and is in beta for Premium subscribers. In-app chat supports text, photos, media attachments, GIFs, and file sharing linked to X handles rather than phone numbers. Audio and video calls were cited by Musk as part of the plan but do not appear in the current version of X.
Musk’s framing focuses on two ideas: keeping content end-to-end encrypted and limiting what the service needs to know by removing ad targeting logic. Consumer messengers often encrypt message content but retain metadata such as counterparties and timestamps; according to him, reducing the use of advertising reduces the attack surface.
