Elon Musk’s X Hires Ex-Aave and Base Design Lead Benji Taylor

Elon Musk’s X has hired crypto-native product designer Benji Taylor as its new head of design, ahead of a wider rollout of the platform’s X Money payments product next month. 

Taylor announced the move on X on Wednesday, saying he was “honoured” to join the company and looking forward to working closely with Musk and X’s head of product Nikita Bier. Taylor’s crypto-native background is notable, previously founding Los Feliz Engineering, a consumer software studio that was acquired by decentralized lending protocol Aave Labs in 2023.

Bier said that he had followed Taylor’s work for years and knew that he was “on track to become one of the best designers in the world,” and that X was “finally teaming up and building the greatest design team in the industry.”

The appointment comes as X prepares to expand X Money, an integrated payments and financial services layer that will introduce peer-to-peer payments, wallet services and a debit card tied to user accounts.

Aave and Base roles

After the Aave acquisition in 2023, Taylor became chief product officer until October 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile, overseeing the company’s product strategy and development for its decentralized lending protocol and related applications.

X’s new design lead. Source: Benji Taylor

Before joining X, he led design for Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, where he was responsible for the network’s product and interface design across its user and developer-facing experiences. He earlier served as senior vice president of product and design at Avara, the renamed Aave Companies group. 

Related: Musk confirms X Money beta testing ahead of planned 2025 launch

X Money rollout 

The timing also stands out. In early March, Musk announced that X Money would begin public access next month, as an integrated payments and financial services layer for the social platform. 

The product is currently in limited external beta and offers users a 6% annual percentage yield on cash balances held in an X Money wallet, a personalized metal Visa debit card engraved with the user’s X handle, and peer-to-peer payments linked directly to the X app. 

Musk has described X Money as part of his plan to turn the platform into an “everything app” that combines social networking, messaging and financial services.

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