Nikita Bier

Bier grew up in Los Angeles and began developing consumer-facing websites as a child.⁠[1][1]

In 2010, Bier founded the app studio Midnight Labs, which tried products including a personal finance app, a college chat app, and a personality test. In 2013, the company raised a small seed round from investors including Greylock (through partner Josh ElmanJosh ElmanJosh Elman is an American product manager and venture capitalist who has been a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) since June 2026, focusing on consumer technology and AI investments. He has worked in product roles at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Robinhood, and Apple, and was formerly a general partner at Greylock Partners.Open the full entry), Bee Partners, and Indicator Ventures, but none of its products took off and its money gradually ran out. Before creating tbh, he shut down a total of 14 apps.⁠[2][2][2][2][3]

During the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Bier, then a student at the University of California, Berkeley, launched Politify: after users entered personal information, the app estimated whether Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s policies would benefit them more financially. Politify reached about 4 million people in its first month and received coverage from many major media outlets.⁠[3][3][3]

He then designed similar budget calculators for local and federal officials; when the federal government shut down in 2013 and a major contract was canceled, he stopped building products for the government and over the following years built more than a dozen apps for teenage users, shrinking his development cycle from about a year to two weeks.⁠[4][4][4][4]

With the company down to about 60 days of cash, Bier’s team developed tbh, an anonymous compliment-polling app: users answered positive questions such as “Who has the best smile?” by choosing one of four friends, and the person chosen received an anonymous notification; the app offered no keyboard input, to prevent cyberbullying. In the summer of 2017, tbh first launched at a high school in Georgia, where 40% of students downloaded it within two days, and the next day it spread to 3,000 schools; it officially launched in a limited number of states in August and reached No. 1 on the U.S. Apple App Store in September.⁠[2][3][3][3][3][2][4]

On October 16, 2017, Facebook, Inc. announced that it was acquiring tbh and would let it operate under its own brand. tbh had reached 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users over the previous nine weeks; the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Bier and his three co-creators, Erik Hazzard, Kyle Zaragoza, and Nicolas Ducdodon, joined the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where Bier became a lead product manager.⁠[2][2][2][2][3]

In February 2018, Bier spoke at the Newton Lecture Series at the University of California, Berkeley, in a conversation moderated by Jeremy Fiance, founder of The House Fund and one of his early investors. He said that everything in Silicon Valley seems like an overnight success but the process was tough, that he had gotten “really good at shutting down apps, really good at failing,” and that his self-doubt had been his greatest asset.⁠[3][3][3][3]

Bier left Meta after four years to return to startups. In August 2022, he, Isaiah Turner, and Dave Schatz launched Gas, an anonymous compliment-polling app for teenagers with mechanics similar to tbh, debuting it at the same high school where tbh had first launched; the new app added a paid feature, “God Mode,” that hinted at who had voted for the user. Gas was then available in only 12 states and for a time was the most downloaded social media app on the U.S. Apple App Store.⁠[4][5][4][4][5][5]

Gas was hit by a sex-trafficking rumor that was entirely false, which affected its downloads; Bier said he and his team received hundreds of graphic death threats as a result. Bier also said that a week after he met with SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry’s CEO to discuss acquiring Gas, Gas was removed from the SnapKit developer platform over the Thanksgiving holiday, halting its growth; Snap’s email to developers, for its part, held that Gas’s practices violated its policy.⁠[6][6][7][7]

On January 17, 2023, the messaging platform Discord announced its acquisition of Gas, without disclosing the terms; Gas continued to operate as a standalone app, and its team joined Discord. According to Sensor Tower data, Gas had 7.4 million installs and nearly $7 million in consumer spending since its launch. In November 2023, Discord shut down Gas.⁠[6][6][6][6][7]

On January 14, 2025, Bier released Explode, a disappearing-message app within iMessage: only the sender needs to install it, text or images “explode” and disappear after the recipient views them once, and screenshots can be blocked; the paid version, Explode+, costs $39.99 per year.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

On June 30, 2025, Bier announced that he had become head of product at X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, writing on X, “I’ve officially posted my way to the top.” He was previously a product growth partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and an adviser to companies including xAI and Solana, and had invested in or advised apps including Locket, BeReal, and Flo. When Musk reached an agreement to acquire Twitter in 2022, Bier had publicly pitched himself as Twitter’s vice president of product.⁠[4][4][8][1][4][1][4]

Days after Bier was appointed head of product at X, X CEO Linda YaccarinoLinda YaccarinoLinda Yaccarino is an American media and advertising executive who served as chief executive officer of the social platform X (formerly Twitter) from June 2023 to July 2025. Before that she led advertising sales at NBCUniversal for more than a decade; her tenure at X saw an advertiser exodus, brand-safety controversies and lawsuits against advertising-industry groups. After leaving X, she became chief executive officer of the telehealth company eMed Population Health in August 2025.Open the full entry announced on July 9, 2025, that she was stepping down; Bier has been a public face of the company ever since.⁠[9][10][10]

On August 5, 2026, after a little more than a year in the role, Bier stepped down as head of product at X, saying it was time to “pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster,” and that he would continue to advise the company. He said he had overseen the launch of 30 new products during his tenure while “protecting the integrity of the town square,” and added that running the app was a 24/7 job and that it was now time for him to take a breather.⁠[8][8][8][8]

In his departure post, Bier wrote that over the previous 400 days X had rebuilt almost every aspect of the product, including the Timeline, the Android app, onboarding, notifications, and chat; that during his tenure X became the first app to show country of origin on profiles and mounted defenses against AI bots; and that X had climbed 70 spots in the App Store since the same time the previous year.⁠[11][11][11]

He did not name a single successor, instead naming the next leaders in his post: @benjitaylorBenji TaylorBenji Taylor is a design lead and software entrepreneur who currently leads design for X and SpaceXAI at SpaceX. He founded Los Feliz Engineering, the maker of Honk and Family, joined Avara when the company was acquired, and later served as chief product officer and as head of design at Base; he has also helped build open-source interface tools such as Agentation and Liveline.Open the full entry on design, @singhai on core product engineering, and @dinkin_flickaa on mobile engineering. The public profiles of those two accounts are Mridul Singhai (product engineering at X) and Jonah Katz (mobile engineering lead for X); The Verge summarized the new leadership as design lead Benji Taylor, with iOS lead Jonah Katz and Mridul Singhai leading the product team. Taylor added the same day that he would remain focused on leading design and would partner with Katz and Singhai on product.⁠[12][11][13][14][9][15]

In October 2026, Bier posted on X that two hours earlier he had been officially disconnected from his X work laptop, calling the job “the most interesting chapter of my life.”⁠[16][16][16]

In the same post announcing that he had been disconnected from his work laptop, Bier also wrote “Good night my sweet little app,” closing with “Onto the next one.” Elon Musk replied to the post on October 3, 2026: “Thanks for everything.”⁠[16][16][17]

As of mid-October 2026, Bier’s X bio read “unemployed” and listed him as the former head of product at X and the former founder of tbh (acquired by Meta) and Gas (acquired by Discord).⁠[18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/nikitabier (opens in a new window)⁠[1]