How much money has X lost since Elon Musk took over?

Two years ago, Elon Musk bought social media platform Twitter, now known as X, in a $44 billion deal that started with an unsolicited offer and wrapped up six months later following a divisive, on-again, off-again saga with the deal on the cusp of a Delaware court proceeding.
At the time, a slew of industry watchers said Musk, then as now sitting atop the Forbes list of richest people, overpaid for the company. But the tech entrepreneur who also heads SpaceX, Tesla, Neuarlink and other holdings, said he was set to unlock Twitter’s untapped value.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement accompanying his initial purchase offer in April 2022. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.
“Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The platform, which was rebranded as X in 2023, has been on a downward slide since Musk took over and new financial reporting from one of the backers of the purchase deal, Fidelity Investments, shows just how much the platform’s value has declined over the last 24 months.
In a Fidelity prospectus released last week, the financial giant reports its investment in Musk’s purchase of Twitter in October 2022, worth nearly $20 million at the time, had declined in value to $4.2 million as of the end of August 2024. That was down 24% from the previous month and reflects a value drop of a staggering 79% from the time Musk bought the platform. Extrapolating Fidelity’s loss shows an X valuation of around $9.2 billion currently.
While Musk has added new ways for X to make money, like charging for premium memberships, the company’s primary source of income, advertising revenue, has hit the skids during his tenure as owner. And that’s largely due to the tech titan’s laissez faire approach to content moderation. Many advertisers have reduced or canceled ad spending on X out of fear their products or services will be touted alongside offensive or objectionable content.
Musk’s own behavior on X has also contributed to advertisers’ exodus from the platform.
Last November, Musk responded to an X post claiming Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Musk’s tweet in response to the post was, “You have said the actual truth.”
Several weeks later, at a New York Times event, Musk said the tweet was the worst, among tens of thousands, he’d ever posted.
“I mean, look, I’m sorry for that … post,” Musk said, per CNN. “It was foolish of me. Of the 30,000 it might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done. And I’ve tried my best to clarify six ways from Sunday, but you know at least I think it’ll be obvious that in fact far from being antisemitic, I’m in fact philosemitic.”
While issuing an apology at the event, Musk also took aim at X advertisers who suspended business after the antisemitic incident, saying “I hope they stop” advertising and “Don’t advertise.”
“If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money,” Musk said, then used profanity to essentially tell them to go away.
And X’s valuation erosion may be headed for even worse days.
A recent global survey by Kantar found that a net 26% of marketers plan to decrease their spending on X next year, the steepest pullback from any major global ad platform, according to a report from CNN. Just 4% of advertisers said they think X ads provide “brand safety” (certainty that their ads won’t appear near extreme content), compared with 39% at Google.