Original Title: "Developing 15 Products to Test Human Nature, This 'Dopamine Dealer' Became Musk's Product Chief"
Original Author: Sleepy.txt, Beating
On June 30, 2025, X welcomed a young product leader. His name is Nikita Bier, 36 years old. Before joining under Musk, he had already multiple times created hit social apps of his own design and sold them to tech giants for tens of millions of dollars.
Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has been determined to transform it into a super app integrating social networking, payments, investments, and banking. However, this path is littered with failures; numerous tech giants have harbored similar dreams, yet none have succeeded.
Against this backdrop, Nikita Bier's appointment carries significant implications.
In the six months since taking office, Bier collaborated with the algorithm team to adjust the recommendation page, increasing the proportion of content from friends, mutual follows, and followers. This change altered X's content distribution logic, bringing users' social relationships back to the core of content distribution.
Recently, Bier announced the upcoming launch of the Smart Cashtags feature. Users can now mention stock or cryptocurrency codes in their tweets, and X will automatically display real-time prices, changes in value, and related discussions. This feature transforms X from a purely social platform into a real-time financial information platform. Users no longer need to leave X to check stock prices or switch between multiple apps, as all the information is presented within a single interface.
On January 16, he revised the X Developer API policy again, no longer allowing InfoFi-type apps that reward users for posting content, and directly revoked API access for these apps. At the same time, he is also pushing for an upgrade to the X Creator Monetization Program.
These reforms may appear fragmented at first glance, but in reality, they all point toward a core objective: transforming X from a social platform into a vast ecosystem that integrates social interaction, influence, and finance.
The Birth of a Dopamine Dealer
In 2012, Nikita Bier was still a student at the University of California, Berkeley. That year, he developed an app called Politify, which aimed to influence American politics through data and logic.
The core feature of Politify is a tax calculator, where users input their income and family situation, and the app calculates the actual impact of different candidates' tax policies on them. Bier believes that if voters can clearly see their own economic interests, they will make more rational choices.
This idea achieved tremendous success during the 2012 presidential election. Politify attracted 4 million users without any marketing budget and once topped the App Store download charts. At that time, Bier believed that information asymmetry in voters' decision-making was the root of social problems, and his product could solve this issue.
But reality quickly gave him a wake-up call. Bier discovered that although users downloaded Politify and became aware of their economic interests, they did not change their voting choices. A blue-collar worker with a $30,000 annual income might still vote for one candidate over another due to cultural identity, even if he knew a different candidate's tax policies would benefit him more.
This made Bier realize that data and logic could not overcome emotional resonance. As a result, between 2012 and 2017, Bier entered a period of intense trial and error. According to Startup Archive, after Politify, he and his team developed more than a dozen applications, attempting to explore human nature from different angles. However, none of them succeeded, either failing to attract users or failing to retain them.
However, each failure deepened Bier's understanding of human nature. He began to realize that humanity's most primal desire is not rationality, not knowledge, not efficiency, but to be seen, acknowledged, and praised.
By 2017, they had completed their 15th product, tbh (To Be Honest).
This is an anonymous social app where users can anonymously vote for their friends on questions such as "Who is most likely to become president," "Who is most likely to become a millionaire," "Who is most likely to save the world," and so on. All the questions are positive, and all the feedback consists of compliments.
In two months, tbh attracted 5 million users, with daily active users once reaching 2.5 million. It started from a high school in Georgia and quickly achieved viral growth among high school students across the United States. In October 2017, Facebook acquired tbh for less than $30 million.
The success of tbh marks the moment when Bier stopped trying to persuade users with data and instead began to drive users through emotions. He no longer attempts to solve social issues, but instead exploits human weaknesses to create addictive products. From this point on, the serious entrepreneur has vanished, replaced by a dopamine dealer who skillfully navigates the scene.
Musk's Choice
In October 2017, Nikita Bier joined Facebook with her team as a product manager.
Internally at Facebook, Bier shared tbh's growth strategies with his Facebook colleagues. According to internal Facebook documents obtained by BuzzFeed News in August 2018, Bier's team detailed how they leveraged Instagram's mechanisms to achieve rapid growth.
The core of this strategy is to take advantage of teenagers' curiosity and their tendency to follow the crowd. The Bier team would create private accounts on Instagram, follow all the students at a target high school, and then write teasing bios in the account profiles, such as "You have been invited to join a mysterious app—stay tuned!"
Out of curiosity, students would request to follow this account. Then the Bier team would wait for 24 hours to collect all the follow requests, and at 4 p.m., when school was over, they would make the account public and add an App Store link in the bio. At the same time, Instagram would notify all the students that their follow requests had been accepted. After seeing the notification, the students would visit the account, see the download link, and then download the app.
Although this strategy is unconventional, it demonstrates Bier's precise grasp of human nature. If you want users to take action, you don't need to persuade them; you just need to create an emotional trigger they can't resist.
Less than a year after its acquisition, Facebook shut down tbh, citing "low usage." However, Bier chose to stay at Facebook and continued working as a product manager. During this time, Bier gained deep insights into the operations and internal politics of large social platforms. He observed how Facebook used algorithmic recommendations to generate controversy, how it used data analysis to predict user behavior, and how it designed products to increase user engagement and time spent on the platform.
The most important lesson he learned from Facebook is that social platforms are not about connecting people, but about creating emotional fluctuations. The greater the emotional fluctuations, the longer users stay, and the higher the advertising revenue.
In 2021, Bier left Facebook and joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a Product Growth Partner. In 2022, he and his former team launched Gas, an upgraded version of tbh. Gas added features such as voting, gamification, and paid functions, allowing users to pay to see who had complimented them.
Gas attracted 10 million users within three months, generating $11 million in revenue and briefly surpassing TikTok and Meta to become the most popular app in the United States. In January 2023, Discord acquired Gas for $50 million.
The success of Gas further validates a key insight from Bier: the human desire for praise can be monetized. If you can create an environment where users long to be seen and recognized, and then strategically place a payment barrier at critical moments, users will not hesitate to pay.
This insight is exactly what Musk needs.
In October 2022, Elon Musk spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter and renamed it X. In his vision, X will evolve into the ultimate closed-loop platform integrating social media and finance. However, to turn this dream into reality, Musk must tackle a crucial challenge: how to dissolve the psychological boundaries of users, enabling them to naturally conduct financial transactions while scrolling through social content.
This is actually still a question about human nature. What kind of driving force can help users overcome the psychological barriers to transition from trading and investing on a social platform to saving?
Bier's connection with Musk began with a bold self-recommendation. When Musk announced his acquisition of Twitter, Bier posted a tweet on X: "@elonmusk Hire me to run Twitter as VP of Product." This tweet received no response at the time, but Bier did not give up.
Over the next three years, he consistently posted on X, sharing in-depth thoughts on product growth, user psychology, and social networks. His tweets gradually gained significant influence, and also demonstrated to Musk his profound understanding of products and human nature.
Therefore, by June 2025, when X needed a product leader who could integrate social media and finance, Musk thought of Bier. Upon announcing his joining, Bier wrote, "I've officially posted my way to the top," and replied beneath his 2022 self-recommendation tweet with, "Never give up."
This story itself is the best illustration of Bier's concept that "influence is currency."
Before joining X, Bier also served as a consultant for the Solana Foundation, where he managed the mobile strategy for the foundation. During this experience, he witnessed firsthand how cryptocurrencies could achieve viral growth through social media, realizing that influence itself had become a quantifiable and tradable financial asset.
Musk chose Bier because, within Musk's framework of first-principles thinking, the essence of finance is not technology, but trust and emotion. You must know how to effectively utilize emotion as a lever.
And Bier is exactly an expert in this area.
His series of actions at X essentially represent the ultimate manipulation of emotional leverage. Take, for example, his reform of the creator incentives at X. Bier well understands that for a platform to continuously produce high-quality content, it must address the core anxieties of creators. So, in the visible realm, he upgraded X's creator incentive program, ensuring that creators receive more money in each cycle. Yet, in the unseen realm, he was actually actively manipulating the algorithm to create idols.
In January 2026, renowned American creator Dan Koe posted a long article on X with the title "How to Fix Your Entire Life in One Day." Within a week, the article received 150 million reads and 260,000 likes, becoming the most-read long-form post in X's history.
This is the example set by Bier. By pushing a deep, long-form article to billions of exposures, Bier has sent a clear message to all creators—especially those hesitating whether to invest in in-depth content on X: as long as your content is of high quality, X's algorithm will help you amplify its reach.
This is a more sophisticated strategy than direct monetary incentives. It addresses creators' fear that their content will be ignored or disappear without a trace. Dan Koe's case can convince them that on X, deep thinking and high-quality content can be discovered and amplified by the platform.
This strategy is in line with the psychological techniques Bier has used in tbh and Gas. He realized that, for creators, what they truly need is visibility and recognition. By setting a benchmark for exposure, Bier effectively stimulated the participation enthusiasm of creators, drawing more high-quality content to the platform and thus forming a positive ecological cycle.
Wealth Anxiety Among Generation Z
This keen understanding of human nature enables Bier to repeatedly and accurately hit the pain points of its target audience. In terms of finance, Bier addresses the younger generation who are repeatedly tormented by financial anxiety.
In October 2024, BuzzFeed published an article titled "This Woman Reveals How She Copes with Financial Anxiety in Her 20s." The article's protagonist is Hayley, a 27-year-old woman living in northern Colorado, who works as a receptionist at an animal clinic and earns $17 per hour.
She can only work 33 hours per week, and her monthly fixed expenses include: $600 for rent, $400 for a car loan, $150 for car insurance, $50 for electricity, $70 for her mobile phone bill, $100 for a student loan, and $50 for the minimum credit card payment, totaling $1,420. Although she sets aside $50 each payday as pocket money, this money often runs out quickly.
Hayley said, "Every expense comes with guilt; I always feel like this money should have been saved. As long as this financial black hole isn't filled, I can't achieve the fundamental sense of security that would make me feel at ease. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is absolutely right. I hate this society—it forces people to merely survive, yet it robs them of the chance to truly live."
Hayley's story is a microcosm of an entire generation.
According to a Bank of America survey in July 2025, 72% of young people have changed their lifestyle habits due to rising living costs. Among them, 33% of Generation Z individuals feel significant financial pressure, and more than half attribute this to economic instability. EY's research also highlights that financial issues are the primary source of anxiety for Generation Z. Additionally, a 2024 report by Arta Finance shows that financial stress has even caused 38% of Generation Z and 36% of Millennials to experience a midlife crisis earlier than expected.
This anxiety became the fuel for X's expansion into the financial sector.
After Nikita Bier joined X, he quickly launched a series of product adjustments mentioned at the beginning of this article. However, Bier's true ambition is not merely to make X a financial information platform; he wants to transform X into a financial trading platform.
According to a report by the Financial Times in November 2025, X is developing in-app trading and investment features, allowing users to buy stocks and cryptocurrencies directly within the X platform. X's CEO, Linda Yaccarino, revealed that Visa will be the first partner for the XMoney account. As of December 2025, X Payments has obtained money transmission licenses in 38 U.S. states, covering approximately 75% of the U.S. population.
On X, every like, every comment, and every retweet represents an expression of user sentiment. Bier's task is to convert this sentiment data into financial signals. If a user frequently likes tweets about a particular stock, X can infer that he is interested in that stock and then push a purchase link at the appropriate time. If a user frequently comments on tweets about cryptocurrencies, X can infer that he is a potential cryptocurrency investor and then recommend related investment products.
This is an emotion-based financial service. It doesn't require users to actively search, fill out complex forms, or go through cumbersome verification processes. It only needs to detect users' emotional fluctuations and then provide a simple transaction entry point at moments when their emotions are high.
Bier said in an interview: "Consumers don't choose to use a product because of functional differences, but because of the emotional resonance they experience while using it." Similarly, the core logic behind X's financialization is not to provide better financial services, but to capture users' emotions and, at moments of heightened emotion, convert those emotions into transactions.
This model is particularly effective among Generation Z. According to a CFA Institute research report, 31% of Generation Z started investing before the age of 18, 54% of Generation Z investors obtain investment information through social media, and 44% of Generation Z investors hold cryptocurrency, with an average portfolio allocation to cryptocurrency as high as 20%.
For this generation, social media is not only a channel for obtaining information but also a place where investment decisions are made. They no longer trust traditional financial institutions or Wall Street analysts; instead, they trust KOLs (key opinion leaders) on social media, as well as their own emotions and intuition. And X is precisely the amplifier of these emotions and intuitions.
The Curse of Super Apps
However, before Musk and Bier, countless giants had tried to create a super app, and they all failed.
Once the dominant force in mobile phones, BlackBerry and its messaging service, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), were just one step away from becoming a super app. Senior executives had ambitious plans to layer payments and services on top of social features, aiming to build a digital empire of their time. However, reality proved harshly unforgiving. A series of strategic missteps caused BlackBerry to steadily lose ground in the competitive landscape. By 2013, its once 20% market share had dwindled to less than 1%, and the grand imperial dream ultimately ended in a spectacular failure.
BlackBerry's failure is not an isolated case. Amazon's attempt also ended in failure. In 2014, the Fire Phone was launched with Jeff Bezos's grand vision of integrating e-commerce and social networking. However, it quickly failed within a short period. This attempt not only cost Amazon a $1.7 billion write-off, but also became a major setback in Bezos's business career.
By reviewing these cases, we can summarize three reasons why super apps have not succeeded in the West.
First, there is the user habit of high specialization. Users in Europe and the United States prefer standalone apps that each perform a specific function. A small business owner often relies on multiple specialized tools simultaneously, such as Shopify for transactions, QuickBooks for accounting, and Slack for collaboration. In their view, being "all-in-one" often means being mediocre. Super apps find it difficult to challenge the leaders in these specialized niches in terms of professional depth.
Secondly, there are strict regulatory barriers and privacy boundaries. The essence of a super app is data dominance, while privacy protection is a critical regulatory concern in Europe and the United States. Consolidating massive amounts of data within a single platform raises significant societal concerns and causes compliance costs and data breach risks to increase exponentially.
Finally, there is the already solidified landscape dominated by major players. In mature markets, there are no unclaimed territories; Google, Amazon, and Apple have long divided users' digital lives among themselves. New super apps not only face functional competition but also must challenge users' brand loyalty to the existing ecosystems.
So, if predecessors have all failed, can X actually succeed?
X's advantages are obvious. It already has 550 million active users, and Musk has sufficient financial resources and political connections to handle regulatory challenges. Most importantly, X isn't trying to build something from scratch, but rather gradually adding financial features on top of its existing foundation.
This approach of making small but rapid progress saves users from the hassle of fiddling around. There's no need to download anything or relearn operations; simply clicking an additional button within a familiar interface connects social and financial functions seamlessly.
However, X actually faces significant resistance. American users have long been accustomed to using Venmo for money transfers and Robinhood for stock and cryptocurrency trading. These specialized apps are already functioning well—why would they switch to X?
This is the problem Nikita Bier aims to solve. His strategy is to integrate financial transactions into users' everyday social interactions. Instead of urging you to "do business" on X, he wants you to buy a stock or cryptocurrency effortlessly while scrolling through your feed. This seamless experience is the key to whether X can succeed this time.
However, this seamless experience also brings a new problem. When social interaction and finance become integrated, users' emotional fluctuations can be directly translated into financial transactions. Could this model exacerbate irrational market booms? Might it lead users to make poor investment decisions when they are emotionally high? Could this potentially invite more regulatory troubles?
This question currently has no answer.
Emotional Alchemy
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the transformation of social media from "connecting people" to "generating emotions." We have seen the attention economy shift from "content is king" to "emotions are king." We have also witnessed wealth distribution change from "capital is king" to "influence is king."
Nikita Bier's career is a microcosm of this transformation. He evolved from an entrepreneur who tried to change the world through rationality into a dopamine dealer who exploits users' emotions.
This transformation is actually inevitable for the entire era. In an age of information overload and scarce attention, rationality gives way to emotion, logic gives way to intuition, and long-term considerations give way to short-term ones. In this era, whoever can create emotions can capture attention; whoever can capture attention can gain influence; and whoever can gain influence can acquire wealth.
This is a brand new era, an era driven by emotions, an era where influence equals wealth.
In this era, each of us is a product of Nikita Bier. Our likes, comments, and shares are captured by algorithms, analyzed by data, and amplified by emotions. Our attention, our emotions, and our influence are all being transformed into liquidity, wealth, and power.
In this era, emotions are both the most powerful weapon and the most dangerous poison.
Click to learn about BlockBeats' job openings.
Welcome to join the official Lulin BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group:https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram discussion group:https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter account:https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia