Since Elon Musk bought Twitter a year ago, he has blown it up to create something else entirely.

What is now called X is in the process of becoming “a single application that encompasses everything,” he recently told employees. Being the “digital town square,” as he has described Twitter in the past, isn’t enough. For X to succeed in Musk’s eyes, the platform needs to compete with YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and the entire banking industry.

“We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app,” Musk said during an internal X meeting on October 26th, which The Verge listened to and is publishing a full transcript of below. The meeting was timed to the anniversary of Musk officially buying Twitter for $44 billion and was his first joint all-hands with Linda Yaccarino, who joined as CEO in May.

Musk, who still oversees X’s product and engineering teams, did most of the talking during the 45-minute call. While the goal of the all-hands was partially to answer the questions that employees submitted ahead of time, he instead took the opportunity to pontificate on everything from sharing bad news in meetings to the state of journalism.

Turning Twitter into X has been a messy process so far. The company’s biggest advertisers have mostly fled over the past year, thanks to Musk’s antics; his X Premium subscription hasn’t caught on; the business is still not profitable; and its valuation is sinking.

Musk, however, projected optimism during the call last week, saying at one point: “I think this is the fastest rate of innovation maybe ever for any internet company.” 

Here’s the full transcript of Musk and Yaccarino’s all-hands meeting with X employees on October 26th, lightly edited for clarity:

Linda Yaccarino: It’s our all-hands, and I want to say thank you to everyone on this call, and especially for everyone in acknowledging what we’ve been able to accomplish in what has been a remarkable first year since the acquisition. It would be absolutely impossible not to acknowledge all the hard work from everybody around the world who’s on this call, especially as we’ve had to come together since the terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel. Unspeakable times we’re living through. It has been 20 days since our teams have been working around the clock to keep this platform safe and a place of connection for those most in need. So, I genuinely say thank you. 

I’ve been here about 16 weeks. And that means that for about half the year, I was actually on the outside looking in. That outside view is actually what drew me here. And I have to tell you, the insider view: intoxicating. I’m grateful to be with all of you. What’s most incredible since I joined the company is the scope of our ambition. The pace of innovation at this company, seriously, nothing else like it exists. No analog for what’s going on here. Before I came to X, I was always trying to push our customers, my company, to move faster. No worries. I don’t have to do that here. Speed is at our core. The hustle and pace is enviable, and what we’re building here is completely reshaping what our users and our clients expect of a platform. 

We have to take a moment and think about what we’ve done in just a year. The advancements we’ve made in video, growing our communities, our creator program, X Hiring. I don’t know about you, but some of you may have been victims to all my video calling last night. It doesn’t stop. And with payments around the corner, I think it’s pretty exciting to say that there’s no surrogate for X, which is why everyone watches our every move—

Elon Musk: And copies us.

LY: When you’re as consequential as X is, watching every move, I guess it’s to be expected. We need to get used to it. We need to lean in and own it. And I’m intentionally using the word consequential because we’re creating something a lot more meaningful here. We’re working to protect the freedom of expression. What we’re doing here in building at X is helping humanity thrive. 

Listen, I know the decisions we make are not always expected ones, not always the easy ones. Change, innovation, pushing against legacy. It’s not simple. It’s actually really hard. But this company, everyone on the call, [are] exceptional people. We’re writing history. Really creating a new playbook. And we know there are skeptics out there, but our momentum — we all know — it’s catching on. And in the process, we’re creating more and more advocates. 

So, I’m long on X. I certainly am long on all of you. And I just want to say congrats on a great big year. Ready for year two. And with that, I will pass it to Elon.

EM: Thank you, Linda. Thank you for joining. A tremendous amount has been accomplished in the past year. It’s really lightning speed execution. We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app. [An] all-inclusive feature set that you can basically do anything you want on our system. Obviously, that’s not to the exclusion of other apps, but I think the fundamental thing that’s missing that would be incredibly useful is a single application that encompasses everything. You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like, from one single, convenient place. 

They have this in China, to some degree, with WeChat. We just don’t have that. It doesn’t exist outside of China. This doesn’t mean that we just want to copy WeChat. I think we can actually create something ultimately that exceeds WeChat. We can do some pretty incredible stuff here. 

So, I’ll just run through the list of all the accomplishments the team has made in this year. And I should say that we’ll try to do this every quarter as opposed to every year. A year is quite a long time. Every three months or so, we’ll do this. And the next one we will do with X live video. We’ll just livestream it to earth, basically. We’re a company that believes in transparency, so maximally transparent would be anybody who wants to watch our company talk can do so. And it’s helpful that we’re not publicly traded actually because you can say what we want to say without some sort of class action lawsuit.

LY: [Laughs]

EM: It’s honestly a plague. When I looked at the list, I was like, “Wow, this is really incredible.” So, most recently, we launched audio / video calling, and I had a number of people actually call me— 

LY: Did you pick up, Elon? 

EM: I did. I thought it was like a FaceTime or Signal call or something like that. It’s X audio / video calling. Super cool. That’s the most recent thing that’s still kind of like a beta version. But it’ll have all the functionality that people have come to expect from FaceTime or Signal. 

We’ve also made radical improvements to video in general. So our live video stream is much better, dramatically better. You can now upload long videos, including an entire movie. I thought it was very cool that Apple, for example, uploaded an entire episode of the Silo show, which is actually quite a good show. I was told that it was the number one biggest social media event that Apple has done in its entire history, which is wild. Obviously, companies should do more than that.

LY: That certainly got everyone’s attention, and when you think about that, in addition to the immersive video product or vertical video product, a lot of people, or a lot of customers that I talk to, are surprised at the growth, right? Seventy percent growth in the last six months but driven by Gen Z. So, when you think about the strides we’re making so quickly in video, it’s certainly getting everyone’s attention.

EM: Yeah. Video is the highest bandwidth way to consume information. Sometimes people wonder [about] Gen Z, “Is their mind rushing or something because they’re just watching short videos over and over again?” But actually, video is the highest bandwidth means of communication. Certainly, what video you are watching, of course, that can be dubious, but obviously, that is the best way to consume information. You can think of a meme as really compressed information, where you’re conveying many different ideas in a single image with some text. 

So, I’ll go through the list, which is pretty, pretty amazing. It’s a fun list, actually. 

LY: Yes. 

EM: We launched the ad revenue share for creators or really anyone on the platform. This has made a big difference to the lives of many people. We’ve paid over $20 million to creators, and we expect that number to rise significantly. Our number of creators has increased by more than an order of magnitude, and that’s just since the middle of this year. In less than six months, we’ve seen a 10x increase in creators. 

Communities is growing fast. There’s a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling. But we’re seeing rapid percentage growth in Communities. I’m excited about some of the changes we made to Communities. One of them I think will be quite powerful is for a community administrator to be able to include any X account. You can add any @ handle that hasn’t joined the community. 

Take this Diablo community, which I’m on. What you’d want to see there