Building viral apps made him a star. Can he work the same magic for Elon Musk’s X?

No one can say Nikita Bier is a one-hit wonder. 

In 2017, the entrepreneur built TBH, an app that let teenagers anonymously compliment one another, then promptly sold it to Facebook for about $30 million.

In 2022, he created virtually the same app, this time called Gas, and launched it in the same exact high school. The result was foreordained: Gas was acquired, this time by Discord, for an undisclosed amount. 

But on Monday, Bier announced his biggest score yet: He was named head of product at X. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve officially posted my way to the top,” he posted alongside a photo of himself thumbs-upping with X owner Elon Musk. 

The Standard called Bier to discuss the appointment. He texted back that he was on a plane and did not respond to additional requests for comment. However, his track record of building apps, selling them to the highest bidder, then reveling in his success on X, speaks for itself. 

Over the last decade, Bier has established himself as one of Silicon Valley’s foremost masters of virality, poking fun at founders like himself to his half a million X followers. He’s become a guiding light for startup builders, who fork over thousands for 15 minutes of his time, and for AI and crypto companies like xAI and Solana, which brought him on as an adviser. 

Now, he’s about to take his tactics to the internet’s town square. It’s a gamble that reflects X’s broader bet: that chaotic creativity is worth more than corporate discipline. And it’s a bold move for Bier, who is now at the helm of a platform experiencing a cultural and financial resurgence, as X is on track for its first year of ad revenue growth since Musk’s takeover in 2022, according to Bloomberg. Several of his friends told The Standard that Bier was born for the role. “He has a playbook,” investor Joshua Browder said. “And the playbook works.” 

In 2012, Bier, then about 22, got his first taste of an app going viral — “the most thrilling drug,” as he later called it on a podcast — when he created Politify, which let voters see in exact dollars what a candidate’s tax proposal would cost them. It was purposefully minimal in scope: He built it between classes at UC Berkeley, with the ethos that “building very small things that have a high probability of going viral” can be the perfect way to “establish a name for yourself,” he wrote later. 

Politify did go viral, getting about 4 million users, and raised Bier’s profile, helping him win deals with local and federal officials to design similar calculators for their budgets. But when the federal government shut down in 2013 and a major contract was canceled, Bier swore off building for the government, a slow and cumbersome customer. Instead, he spent the next five years building more than a dozen apps aimed at a faster, more dopamine-hungry user base: teenagers. 

Bier learned how to rapid-fire build, shrinking his development cycle for a new app from about a year to two weeks. In 2017, he landed his first mega-hit with TBH, which created polls for teens like “most likely to be president” and “best smile.” The poll answers were populated with students’ names, and peers could anonymously vote. The app launched in August, and by September, it was No. 1 in the App Store. By October, it was acquired by Facebook. 

At Meta, Bier found himself at odds with Big Tech decorum. He had jokingly hung a painting of Tim Cook in his office — a nod to Apple’s control over the app ecosystem. A colleague gently suggested it wasn’t wise to hang a rival CEO’s portrait in Mark Zuckerberg’s building.

But, mostly, Bier chafed at the bureaucracy of the corporate world. “A lot of the insights that you have are not things that you can necessarily present or put in writing in a VP meeting, like, we’re building an app for teens to flirt,” he told podcaster Lenny Rachitsky. “That makes it really difficult to be completely intellectually honest about what you’re building. And when the team isn’t honest about it, then it’s really hard to iterate toward the right thing.” 

He left after four years to return to the startup lifestyle — and to answer a question that had long haunted him: What if he had charged TBH’s teenage users to see who voted for them in the polls? “I was like, would it have made even more than the acquisition if we just monetized it?” Bier said to Rachitsky. 

In August 2022, he created Gas, a near-clone of TBH, with one monetizable twist: a “God mode” that let teens see who had voted for them. Gas went viral and, five months later, was acquired by Discord. By this point, Bier was a phenomenon. “When does the road for a three-peat start?” wrote Morning Brew’s Austin Rief. 

Now Bier is taking his experimental ethos to X, where he will be tasked with Musk’s long-standing mandate: to transform it into a super app, one that allows users to network, date, video chat, and manage their money in one place. In pursuit of his vision, Musk has incorporated his own AI company’s chatbot into X for premium users and has announced X Money, a partnership with Visa to create a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment services.  

Bier has given few hints as to what he plans to do, but he has suggested he’d like to add AI prompts to let people filter their feeds and noted that “someone should fix notifications.” 

Bier’s friend Madison Campbell, founder of Leda Health, said he’s a “formidable force” whom she could see as X’s CEO one day. She pointed to his loyalty as another reason Musk might want him on board. “He hasn’t left, despite everything,” she said. “He stood by the platform and only grew his audience.” 

​​When Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter in 2022, Bier even pitched himself for a job. “Hire me to run Twitter as VP of Product,” he posted. “I’ve been building social apps for 11 years — and not in a way that leads products to decay like a typical BigTech ‘product director dad.’”

On Monday night, he reposted it with a new reply: “Never give up.”