One year after takeover
Musk’s X isn’t even worth half that much anymore
October 31, 2023, 7:20 a.m
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Billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter a year ago with big goals. It is now clear that things are not going well. User numbers and advertising revenue have been falling since Musk’s involvement. Now the platform also admits that the company’s value has halved.
According to media reports, Elon Musk’s online platform When shares were allocated to employees, X was valued at a total of $19 billion, wrote Fortune magazine and the US financial service Bloomberg, among others.
Musk paid around $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022. He has since renamed the service to X and wants to use this as a basis to build an app with more functions including financial services. The platform has suffered a significant decline in advertising revenue since the takeover. Musk has said several times that they are only about half as high as they once were on Twitter. Many companies avoid X as an advertising platform because they fear a negative environment for their brands. In addition, Musk took out loans of around $13 billion for the takeover – which are now on X and for which it is estimated that around $1.2 billion in interest will be due per year.
It’s not just money that’s missing
In the search for income, Musk relies on subscriptions. For a short time, there were restrictions on how many posts free users could see per day. In New Zealand and the Philippines, new users can only publish posts and redistribute others’ posts for a fee of one US dollar per year on a trial basis. For free, you can only use X passively: read posts, watch videos, follow other users.
Not only advertisers, but also some users are turning their backs on X. The service itself no longer publishes information about user numbers. However, the analysis company Apptopia assumes that the daily number of users has fallen from 140 million to 121 million since the takeover. The estimate, reported by the industry blog “Big Technology”, is one of the few attempts to estimate the user base. Similarweb calculated a decline in traffic to the web version of X by around 15 percent. Musk’s profile, however, received almost twice as many visits in September as it did a year ago.