Elon Musk is coming for your hashtags on X

Updated June 27, 2025, 8:03 a.m. | By East Coast Breakfast

No more #Hashtags? Elon Musk’s latest X update has the internet losing its mind!

Elon hashtag — Elon Musk / @elonmusk / X

Tech billionaire and part-time chaos agent Elon Musk is back at it.

This time, he’s coming for the humble hashtag.

From Friday, hashtags will be banned from adverts on X.

Musk announced the move this week, calling hashtags an “esthetic nightmare” (his words, not ours) and saying it’s time for a cleaner, sleeker look on the platform.

Starting tomorrow, the esthetic nightmare that is hashtags will be banned from ads on 𝕏
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 26, 2025

Why is this happening?

For years, hashtags have been the social media equivalent of seasoning. Just sprinkle them on your post to get more eyes on it, join trending conversations, or rally people around a cause (#FreeBritney, anyone?).

Advertisers especially loved them for pushing products into popular trends.

Under Musk’s rule however, X is shifting toward a more minimalist design. Basically: fewer tags, more polish.

He believes hashtags mess with the visual vibe of ads and reckons it’s time for a cleaner, hashtag-free feed.

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This isn’t Elon’s first anti-hashtag rant. Back in December 2024, he called them “ugly” and said the system didn’t need them anymore.

Why? Artificial Intelligence (AI), of course.

X’s discovery tools (powered by Elon’s AI project Grok) are apparently smart enough now to group topics and trends without needing hashtags.

So while hashtags have been a thing since 2007 (RIP #ThrowbackThursday), the platform’s new AI brain thinks it can do better without them.

What are users saying?

As expected, the X-verse had thoughts. While some folks shrugged it off, others raised more pressing platform problems that maybe deserved attention first:

“What about bots? Isn’t that a bigger aesthetic nightmare?” It really is, to be honest.

“Fix how the app scrolls by itself when I’m trying to read a post, please.” The worst part about this is scrolling past everything else, trying to find that post again, with no luck.

“The real issue is clickbait threads posted just for payouts - it’s getting ridiculous.” Not as ridiculous as all those threads though.

Each of these users make very good points.

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What bad has the hashtag ever done besides help us find content we like and what’s trending?

As much as the hashtags are only being removed for ads right now, it might not be long before everyone loses hashtags (to clean up the "esthetic nightmare").

Judging by the number of users who’re upset by this, it might just lead to a #NoMoreHashtags trend (ironically, without the hashtag).