The social media platform formerly known as Twitter is worth almost 80% less than two years ago when Elon Musk bought it, according to estimates from investment giant Fidelity.
X (formerly known as Twitter) no longer trades publicly after Musk shelled out $44 billion to take it private in October 2022.
However, Fidelity discloses what it believes is the value of its shares of X (formerly known as Twitter), and those estimates serve as a closely watched barometer for the overall health of the company.
As of the end of August, those shares were worth just $4.2 million, according to a Sunday filing by Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund.
That new estimate marks a 24% drop in value from what Fidelity estimated as of the end of July. And it represents a staggering decline of 79% from the $19.66 million that Fidelity estimated the shares were worth in October 2022 when Musk acquired Twitter.
The new valuation from Fidelity implies that it believes X (formerly known as Twitter) is now worth just $9.4 billion — a far cry from the $44 billion that Musk paid. Other investors could value X (formerly known as Twitter) differently.
Analysts say Fidelity’s plunging price tag for X (formerly known as Twitter) likely reflects shrinking ad revenue at the company, which no longer publicly releases quarterly financial metrics.
Fidelity declined to comment on individual companies.
X (formerly known as Twitter) did not respond to a request for comment.
Ad pressure on X (formerly known as Twitter)
“Musk clearly overpaid for this asset,” Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, told CNN in an email.
Ives said that he believes Twitter was really worth around $30 billion when Musk bought it, and today it’s worth closer to $15 billion. He said that while engagement on X (formerly known as Twitter) is “strong,” ad pressure has persisted.
Under Musk’s ownership, some advertisers have expressed concerns about extreme content on the platform that they don’t want their brands linked to.
A recent global survey by Kantar found that a net 26% of marketers plan to decrease their spending on X (formerly known as Twitter) next year, the steepest pullback from any major global ad platform. Just 4% of advertisers said they think X (formerly known as Twitter) ads provide “brand safety” (certainty that their ads won’t appear near extreme content), compared with 39% at Google.
In November, Musk faced a backlash from brands, some of which halted spending on X (formerly known as Twitter), after the billionaire embraced an antisemitic conspiracy theory favored by White supremacists.
Musk later apologized for what he called his “dumbest” ever social media posting. However, during that apology, Musk also told fleeing advertisers: “Go f**k yourself.”
But X (formerly known as Twitter) continues to be a major player in social media under Musk’s ownership.
The company said it had 570 million monthly active users during the second quarter, up 6% from the year before.
However, research firm Similarweb has found some drops in engagement.
X (formerly known as Twitter) had 73.5 million monthly active users on iOS and Android combined in the United States in August, according to Similarweb data shared with CNN. That represents a drop of nearly 11% year over year and a 20% decline from October 2022.
Similarweb also found that US web traffic to X.com in August was lower than it was for Twitter.com before Musk bought it. However, Similarweb said X (formerly known as Twitter)’s traffic numbers have been somewhat stronger outside the United States.
Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said he doesn’t believe the value of X (formerly known as Twitter) has dropped nearly as much as Fidelity’s estimates imply.
“Fidelity was overly aggressive. They are essentially cleaning house on the investment,” Munster told CNN.
Munster said that in the long run, he thinks X (formerly known as Twitter) and the data the company has access to will be worth more than the $44 billion that Musk paid for Twitter.
“If you want a real-time understanding of what people are thinking, Twitter is the best source of that. And that is valuable,” Munster said.
It’s especially valuable because X (formerly known as Twitter) data has helped train Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, Musk’s increasingly valuable AI startup.
X (formerly known as Twitter) has emerged as the unique angle for Grok, which Munster said has the potential to be Musk’s biggest source of wealth.
“When Musk bought Twitter, investors didn’t realize we’d be taking off on AI as fast as we are,” Munster said. “Musk buying Twitter is a case of better lucky than smart.”
Hilarious!
Everyone is doing this shit like Musk’s ownership of the company is a temporary embarrassment that’s going to be reversed by the celestial referee and Twitter will come back. They’ve all decided to do unpaid brand management in opposition to the literal brand owner. Yeah, X.com is stupid, but so is its owner and so is anyone who still uses it. Tech companies do stupid product rebrands all the time, but I’ve never seen everyone so continuously unanimously insist that the rebrand is somehow illegitimate or didn’t actually happen. If Microsoft announced tomorrow that Windows was now called Grunglflorp, every journalistic outfit would start only calling it Grunglflorp overnight without any of this tortured “(formerly known as Windows)” nonsense. If you’re using Elon Musks’s X.com™ in 2024, you don’t deserve the fig leaf of pretending you’re actually a cool twitter user from 2014.
Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is the perfect case in point.
I never ever heard anyone calling it Meta in rl.
It’s a bit different with Meta and Alphabet where they changed the corporate names while keeping the existing product names (Facebook and Google), but after maybe the first week I don’t think I saw any news outlets doing this kind of parenthetical every time they mentioned the new brand name, i.e. “the new Meta (formerly Facebook) Quest 2 (formerly Occulus Quest 2) is on sale now”. When it comes to straight 1 to 1 product name changes, you don’t see news outlets in 2024 unanimously using language like “Microsoft Teams (formerly Skype for Business) is a key part of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) along with OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) and Copilot (formerly Bing Chat (formerly Cortana (formerly Clippy)))!”
If I were to speculate about what’s different about Elon Musk’s personal blog, it’s that a disproportionate number of news writers made “being on twitter” a central part of their professional identity, and now they’re embarrassed that a billionaire turned it into a joke overnight on a whim, but they’re also too personally invested in the platform as part of their professional identity to just… not use the bad product they’re embarrassed to name.
This is just smug elitist dross, as is the general tone of the rest of your post. People have reasons to use it like activism and sharing live information that make sense to continuing trying to do because of the sheer size and popularity of the website, in spite of how annoying it has become to use (and it was already plenty annoying before he took over). Which is also why it makes sense to keep calling it Twitter, at least in part; it was one of the most famous (or infamous if you prefer) websites on the western internet prior to the rebrand and one that was commonly referenced outside of Twitter as Twitter, in meta discussions about what Twitter is and the culture of it and the impact it has and so on. People out of the loop would have no idea what they’re talking about calling it X.
It’s basic sensible communication for such a widely known thing that has had such a pervasive pre-existing reputation. Furthermore, it’s not comparable to most rebrands, as most rebrands don’t come as a result of a billionaire user on the platform buying it up, proceeding to fire most of its staff, complain about how much waste it has while showing no understanding of how any of it works, scare away its ad clientele and users alike, and do all of this in broad daylight, like it’s some kind of macabre stage play. If people want to continue to call it Twitter out of pettiness or other reasons, more power to em. I don’t understand how someone can look at this raw demonstration of the capitalist class treating people’s lives and the resources they have available like toy blocks to play with on a whim and have the takeaway that what needs ire is some online publication continuing to include its old name when referencing it.
Posting has never been political action. Reducing politics down to consumption of entertainment products is one of the worst features of American liberalism. Voting in bourgeois elections is nearly worthless in most cases, and all the #resistance tweets in the history of time combined are still worth less than a single vote.
I’d wager that most botched corporate rebrands are a result of acquisitions by some rich dipshit who lays off staff and makes arbitrary changes driven by vanity. Elon Musk didn’t do anything different than every other oligarch in the industry, he’s just less skilled or invested in the PR flattery that most companies employ when they’re actually trying to make a return on investment. Twitter was never a user-owned global town square for democratizing communication. It was always a Skinner box designed to maximize ad revenue.
I will shed no tears for the poor consumers who are now getting their treats from the rude vampire that makes them feel embarrassed instead of the polite vampire who let them pretend that indulging their addiction to looking at ads on their phone was actually politics. I will similarly shed no tears for the writers at CNN, a company so evil that OP intentionally posted an archive link to avoid giving them ad views, or any other privately owned imperial media outlet.
I’m going to stop at this part because if I go much beyond it I’m going to go off on you and I don’t want to do that. Suffice it to say, there’s a good chance I would not be anti-imperialist and communist without Twitter, there are countless bits of information I probably never would have come across, and insulting and downplaying the contribution of mass spreading of information and influence over narrative is counter-revolutionary nonsense.
Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, it’s time to address this nonsense bit by bit.
Then why are you on lemmygrad? Even pre-internet revolutionary efforts had means of spreading information, such as newsletters and the like.
That has 0 to do with what I said. Like it’s so far off, I’m not even sure what you’re talking about.
Twitter political posting is a lot more than posts about voting. You could take my word for this since I know it for a fact over years, or you could continue to wallow in ignorance and talk down about something you don’t understand.
So now you’re just wildly speculating to back up your argument?
Based on wild speculation.
And yet it managed to (hopefully still does) have political action on it that made a discernible difference in how some people think, what they are aware of, etc. Want to guess where I got a lot of primary source information when the 2020 protests were happening? Undeniable clips that made police brutality evident? There was somebody with a megathread on there, updating and adding to it for a while. I don’t think they were even a communist, just someone who wanted to draw attention to what was going on. This on top of all the dissemination of reports from brave citizen journalists on the ground. Want to guess where I got a lot of primary source info on the ongoing genocide? Like whose side are you on here?
Now you’re just making stuff up whole cloth. Embarrassment has nothing to do with it. The fact that the platform has more overt reactionary spew on there than I can ever remember being there is certainly a difference, however. And calling it treats implies you know virtually nothing about Twitter. It is common among people who do use it for political efforts to also hate dealing with it. It has long been a pain in the ass platform, but people use it anyway because it has effectiveness. Sometimes you have to use the tools that are available, even if they aren’t ideal. It isn’t a fucking game.
See everything else I’ve said. This is such a gross portrayal of the platform and its users I don’t even know where to begin. And again, why are you on lemmygrad if you are so viscerally bitter toward Twitter users? It isn’t vastly different in structure. It is also posting on the internet to other people on the internet without necessarily following it up with RL action.
No one asked you to? What a bizarre soapbox to get up on.