X owner Elon Musk said growth on his platform is “stagnant” and revenue is “unimpressive” in a January email to staff that was reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday.
“And we’re barely breaking even,” he added of the social media site’s finances.
Musk, who also runs SpaceX and Tesla, bought the platform, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in late 2022. But the company has seen its valuation drop since then, with Fidelity valuing it at $12.32 billion — or 72% less than what Musk paid for it — last month.
Still, X remains a key platform for breaking news. While they lost some users to rivals like Bluesky and Threads following the 2024 presidential election after Musk publicly and financially backed Donald Trump, X offset those losses with new users. A few weeks after the election, X had 25 million daily users in the U.S., according to data provided by Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.
Other firms have shown X’s monthly user base has dropped since Musk bought the platform. In the U.S., X had 73.5 million monthly users, according to data from Similarweb shared with CNN last month — down 20% from when Musk acquired it. An exact figure on X’s user-base is hard to come by, though, since the company is no longer public and has stopped reporting quarterly user figures.
Musk, in the email obtained by WSJ, pointed to other platforms recently copying X when it comes to censoring less content. Meta, most notably, said it would end its third-party fact-checking operation in favor of a system similar to X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to add context to posts that may be misleading or false.
“Over the last few months, we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes,” Musk wrote in his email. “We are also seeing other platforms begin to adopt our commitment to free speech and unbiased truth.”
