It already served its purpose. He bought it so he could control a narrative, used it to boost right wing voices, used it to capture media for the purposes of suppressing dissent to win an election. He took Russian and Saudi money to buy the platform for the expressed purpose of getting Trump elected.
He’s already used it to buy an election. He’s gotten plenty of value out of it.
This image really enhances the content.
It’s a story about Elon Musk: so we have a Musk silhouette.
It’s also a story about X: so there’s a big phone with an X on it
Finally, it’s a story about users: so there’s a thumb
Like the great masters of old, whoever composed this image really managed to convey the essence of this story via this image, which very much enhances the story.
This person should work for national geographic. So poignant. So gripping. So utterly arresting.
There is a clear successor to X now, Bluesky, which means anyone not happy with X knows what their best option is.
My guess is, when X and Bluesky are roughly even in terms of active users, X’s user base will start to collapse and there will be a mass exodus to Bluesky.
I think Elon might try to intervene in that, either by regulations favoring his platform, or industrial sabotage. Maybe even try to get into the fediverse game, so X accounts could interact with Bluesky or Mastodon ones.
I’m guessing the worst of the worst will hang back at Xitter because they’d otherwise be banned elsewhere, and it will be a cesspool not unlike 8chan.
Which is a nice change, usually every alternative starts up exactly because the worst of the worst got banned from the original and had to migrate to somewhere else, and then it’s an uphill battle for anyone else to make use of that platform.
*cough* Lemmy *cough*.
My guess is that the user base shifts will vary by nation and language. The rate of X enshitification and migration has hit different regions at different speeds.
The writing is on the wall for US users though. Twitter is the AOL or MySpace of this decade. It’s lame and not fun anymore, and Bsky is fun and very active.
According to analysts at Emarketer, from when Musk acquired X in 2022 until 2025, they expect X to have lost 7 million monthly active users in the U.S.
The declining user base pales in comparison to the decline of X’s brand and value. According to a recent report from Brand Finance, X’s brand is now worth 673 million. The brand was valued at $5.7 billion before Musk’s takeover in 2022. When it comes to revenue, X’s revenue fell by 40 percent when compared to the prior year based on internal company data from June 2024.
X as a brand was worth $0 in 2022.
Twitter as a brand was worth $5.7 billion in 2022.
Elon took Twitter to the back of the shed and Old Yeller’d it.
Or if you prefer to be a lot more cynical, he Old Yeller’d it, but he burned it’s equity to get himself elected Co-President, and is worth like a hundred billion dollars more than he was before he did that.
So really, it was a Very Wise and bigly Smart business move.
“Brand” means the value attached to the name, not the value of the company as a whole. With that being said, yes, Elon massively and hilariously overpaid for Twitter (around 50%-100% over the odds IIRC). He offered an absolutely insane price per share as a stunt to get them to change their hate speech policies, and the Twitter shareholders said “Deal” and took his money. That’s why he sued them to try to get out of going through with the deal; he never actually meant to buy the company in the first place, he just made a really, really stupid attempt at a power move and it blew up in his face.
