X is worth 72% less than the $44 billion owner Elon Musk paid for the app formerly known as Twitter, despite that Fidelity had recently marked up the value of its shares by 32.37%, according to a valuation from Fidelity.
The new valuation — which says the company formerly known as Twitter is now worth $12.32 billion — comes from a Sunday report in Axios.
Fidelity’s marked-up valuation offers something for everyone: Musk fans can say the company, which went private when the Tesla CEO took over in October 2022, is headed in the right direction, while Musk haters can gloat its worth much less than what he paid for it. (Just two months ago, Fidelity had valued its X shares at $9.4 billion, or nearly 80% less than what Musk had paid.)
It’ll be worth seeing whether Fidelity gives its X shares another boost before the end of the year, too. The financial services company’s updated valuation reflects its price up through October, so it excludes X’s performance leading up to and during the 2024 election. Musk has said several times recently the app experienced “all-time high” usage around November 5, when his preferred candidate, Donald Trump, beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the race to the White House.
Because its now a private company under Musk’s stewardship, X doesn’t report its financial performance. The company in July said there were 570 million monthly X users, up 6% year-over-year.
In the U.S., X had 73.5 million monthly users, according to data from Similarweb shared with CNN — down 20% from when he bought the company. Following the election, X had 25 million daily active users in the U.S., according to data shared with TheWrap from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.
X has seen a wave of left-leaning users — including several high-profile reporters and celebrities — flee the app following the election. But those losses seem to have been offset by new downloads, with X’s daily user base in the States remaining steady post-election.
Musk himself said he was “obviously overpaying” for X right before the deal closed in 2022. But he said the “long-term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater than its current value.”
The SpaceX and Tesla head honcho said he bought Twitter because it had become overly censorious under the previous leadership of Jack Dorsey.
In September, X released its first Global Transparency Report since Musk took over. Suspensions on the platform had quadrupled under Musk, the report said, due in large part to taking more action against users who violate its “Child Safety” policy.
At the same time, X is censoring far less content and accounts for violating its “hateful content” policy than it did pre-Musk ownership. During the first half of 2024, X suspended 2,361 accounts for violating the policy — which is 97.7% less than it did compared to 2021, when the company was still being run by Dorsey.
Even with X being worth much less than when he bought it, Musk is doing just fine. His net worth has rocketed higher following the election, as his shares of Tesla have increased 44% in the past month. Forbes has his net worth pegged at $335.3 billion on Monday, comfortably ranking him ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person.
