The social media platform X has lost 71% of its value since it was bought by Elon Musk, according to the mutual fund Fidelity.
Fidelity, which owns a stake in X Holdings, said in a disclosure obtained by Axios that it had marked down the value of its shares by 71.5% since Musk’s purchase.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44bn in October 2022 and renamed the platform X in July 2023. Fidelity’s estimate would place the value of X at about $12.5bn.
The number of monthly users of X dropped by 15% in the first year since Musk’s takeover amid concerns over a rise in hate speech on the platform.
Lots and lots of people love parasocial relationships with celebrities, love throwing idiotic over simplified /but effective/ political slogans and newsbites around, and of course attempting to become ‘thought leaders’ or ‘influencers’ of some kind.
People then get addicted to the constant flow of ‘content’ and forget how to live without it.
Basically, it was perfect for the vapid and vain and uncritical people, and as it got more popular, network effect took over to the point well everyone is using it so we should too!
The company has rarely posted profits in its entire history.
It does not have any interesting technology or ideas as a service, app or website, it simply /had/ a large user base, which is basically now dwindling as Musk has proved to be the most incompetent manager of any large social media service that has ever existed.
Even more hilarious, a huge reason Musk bought Twitter was because he believed conspiracy theory type logically inconsistent right wing nonsense about how Twitter was suppressing right wing voices when empirically this could not have been farther from the truth, and then proved all his contradictory notions of how society should work are in fact nonsense with his insane decisions.
He basically acted like a 16 year old 4channer trying to moderate his personal private forum for an edgy video game community for the first time, but applied this kind of thinking to a platform of hundreds of millions of people.
And he is still acting this way, telling advertisers to go fuck themselves and then spinning a story in his head about how he can do no wrong and everyone is evil and out to get him, that the people of Earth will judge advertisers for destroying the one holy website that connects us all.
Paranoid megalomaniacal delusional sociopath.
