Mark Zuckerberg Says Threads Is Now Bigger Than X, or Very Close

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads may have already overtaken Elon Musk’s X in size, marking a significant shift in the battle between the two social platforms.

Speaking to technology journalist Alex Heath on the Sources podcast, the Meta CEO said Threads is “either bigger than X at this point or it’s very soon about to be.”

The comment comes after Threads reached 500 million monthly active users in June, less than three years after its launch.

Zuckerberg’s claim is notable, but it needs some context. Meta has publicly disclosed Threads’ 500 million monthly active users. X does not regularly publish comparable current user figures, making a precise apples-to-apples comparison difficult. Reports in June put X at roughly 550 million monthly active users, based on figures cited in the prospectus for SpaceX, which now owns X.

So Zuckerberg is not presenting a newly released independent measurement showing that Threads has definitively passed X.

He is saying that, based on Meta’s understanding of the platforms’ relative scale, Threads may already be ahead.

Threads has grown remarkably quickly

Threads launched in July 2023 as Meta’s answer to Twitter, which had been acquired by Musk the previous year and later renamed X.

The launch generated enormous initial interest, but the platform subsequently had to prove that people would keep using it after the novelty wore off.

It now appears to have done that.

Meta announced in June that Threads had reached 500 million monthly active users. The company said the platform had added 100 million monthly users in roughly 10 months, after reaching 400 million in August 2025.

That puts Threads at roughly half of the one-billion-user ambition Zuckerberg set for the platform.

The growth has also gone beyond simply copying the features of X.

Meta has increasingly positioned Threads around communities and conversations built around specific interests. In June, it moved its Communities feature out of beta and introduced a Communities Hub to make those groups easier to discover. It also introduced “Your Algo,” allowing users to privately tell Threads which topics they want to see more or less of in their feeds.

Meta had a major distribution advantage

One of the biggest reasons Threads was able to scale so quickly was something most startups do not have: Instagram.

When Threads launched, Meta allowed users to carry their Instagram identity into the new service, giving the platform access to an enormous existing social network.

That remains one of Meta’s biggest advantages.

Instagram has billions of users, giving Meta a built-in distribution channel for promoting Threads rather than having to build an audience entirely from scratch.

That advantage has been significant enough that analysts have described Meta’s ability to move users between its platforms as a strategic asset in its own right.

This is one reason the Threads story matters beyond the rivalry between Zuckerberg and Musk.

It demonstrates what happens when an established technology company can launch a new product into an existing ecosystem of billions of users.

X is still important to Zuckerberg

Interestingly, Zuckerberg’s comments do not suggest that he believes X has become irrelevant.

He told Heath that he continues to post on X because the platform attracts audiences that are particularly valuable to him, including people working in artificial intelligence and technology.

In other words, Threads and X may now be competing for overall scale while still serving somewhat different communities.

That distinction matters.

Having more monthly active users does not automatically mean a platform generates more engagement, influence, advertising revenue or cultural relevance.

It also does not tell us how much time users spend on each platform.

Threads’ 500 million figure is a monthly active user number. It should not be confused with daily active users or time spent on the platform.

Threads has already passed X in one important measure

The competition is not entirely hypothetical.

Forbes reported that Threads had already overtaken X in worldwide daily active mobile users by September, based on Similarweb data.

For the week ending September 21 in that analysis, Threads recorded 130.2 million average daily mobile users compared with 130.1 million for X. By April, the gap had widened, with Threads at 135.7 million compared with 126.9 million for X, according to the same data.

That does not prove Threads has overtaken X across every measure.

But it does show that Threads has become a serious competitor rather than simply an alternative social network created to capitalise on dissatisfaction with Twitter.

The bigger business story

The remarkable part of the Threads story is not that Meta built another social network.

Meta already knows how to build social networks.

The more important question is how quickly it was able to use its existing ecosystem to create a new platform with hundreds of millions of users.

Threads reached 500 million monthly users in less than three years.

For a standalone startup, acquiring an audience of that size would be an extraordinary challenge. Meta was able to launch Threads with something much closer to a ready-made distribution network.

That gives Meta a powerful advantage whenever it decides to enter an adjacent market.

It can experiment, launch a product and use Instagram, Facebook and its broader ecosystem to put the product in front of enormous numbers of people.

X still has something Threads cannot simply copy

For all of Threads’ growth, the platforms are not identical.

X retains a strong position among technology, politics, finance, breaking news and other communities where real-time conversation and a large network of influential users matter.

Zuckerberg’s own continued use of X is evidence of that.

And because X does not regularly publish a directly comparable current monthly-user figure, the claim that Threads has definitively overtaken it should still be treated as Zuckerberg’s assessment rather than an independently established fact.

But the direction of travel is difficult to ignore.

Threads went from being a new app launched in the shadow of Twitter’s transformation into X to a platform with half a billion monthly active users.

Now its creator says it may already be bigger than the company it was built to challenge.

The next question is no longer whether Threads can compete with X.

It is whether Meta can turn that enormous audience into a durable business.