The troubled social media platform formerly known as Twitter has lost 71% of its value since being acquired and rebranded as X by Elon Musk, according to the mutual fund Fidelity.
In a disclosure obtained by Axios, Fidelity said that it had marked down the value of the shares it holds in the platform by 71.5% since Musk’s takeover. Fidelity’s latest revision would place the value of X at around $12.5bn – no small change but a considerable reduction on the $44bn Musk paid for Twitter in October 2022.
Musk’s troubles with X have been extensively chronicled by global news media. In the year following his takeover of Twitter (which Musk only went through with after Twitter threatened to sue him to reneging ) Musk has removed 80% of employees, removed the hugely successful Twitter brand and replaced it with X and also made blue tick verification (and algorithmic boosting of posts) available to anyone prepared to pay $8 per month.
Users responded by using the platform less or leaving altogether – the number of monthly users has dropped by 15% last year although free speech absolutist Musk decided to restore the accounts of individuals such as Katie Hopkins, Alex Jones and Andrew Tate.
Perhaps related to this decision have been concerns about a rise in hate speech on X. Disinformation has been rife and Musk himself appeared to endorse an antisemitic conspiracy theory for which he later apologised, although not before telling the advertisers which abandoned X after Musk’s apparent endorsement of this theory to “go and f**k themselves.”
Musk doubled down at the event in New York saying:
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” Musk continued. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”
In December, the Financial Times reported that X will look to appease small and medium businesses to try to boost advertising revenues.
Wanda Parisien is a computing expert who navigates the vast landscape of hardware and software. With a focus on computer technology, software development, and industry trends, Wanda delivers informative content, tutorials, and analyses to keep readers updated on the latest in the world of computing.
