One and a Half Years After Rebranding to X (formerly Twitter), How Much Has Musk Lost?

It's been a year and a half since Musk renamed Twitter to X in 2023, and on paper, he's lost a lot.

Financial Data

• Acquisition price: $44 billion
• Current valuation (Fidelity data): approximately $12-15 billion
• Ad revenue: down about 60%
• User count: 450 million monthly active users, roughly flat compared to before the acquisition
• Layoffs: cut from 7,500 employees to 1,500

What Is Musk Doing

Clearly, this isn't just about building a social platform: - X has integrated Grok AI - Launched payment features (X Money) - Currently applying for financial licenses in various states - The goal is to become the "WeChat of the US" — social + payments + content + AI

User Changes

The political atmosphere on X has indeed shifted. More people are choosing to migrate to Threads or Bluesky. But X's "real-time information" attribute remains strong — when major news breaks, people still head to X first to search.

For tech professionals, X remains one of the best channels for staying on top of AI/tech frontier information. Whether you like or hate Musk, that hasn't changed for now.

References:

• X Blog / The Verge