Featured Image Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/Nathan Stirk/Getty Images
Topics: Business, Elon Musk, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, Money
Ellie Kemp
Topics: Business, Elon Musk, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, Money
Elon Musk has tanked Twitter's value, with the platform reportedly now worth 72 percent less than what he paid for it.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO infamously bought out the social media site for $44 billion back in October 2022.
Now, reports from Axios and Fidelity claim that Twitter has dropped to some $32 billion less than Musk's initial purchase value, making it around $12.3 billion overall.
This is all despite a 32 percent uptick in stock price.
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The value of Twitter's shares actually increased by about 22 percent immediately following Musk’s announcement to acquire the company.
But prices began to fall again following a number of controversial decisions by Musk, including the major decision to rebrand Twitter to X in July 2023.
The platform’s verification system was also overhauled, allowing anyone with a subscription to buy a sought-after blue tick.
As if that wasn't enough, almost $2 billion worth of advertising was pulled when major brands stopped using the site.
A report from Media Matters for America last November highlighted how 50 of the top 100 advertisers on Twitter apparently fled, including Chanel, CNN, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Kellogg Company, LinkedIn Corporation, Nestle, The Coca-Cola Company and other big-name corporations.
Musk gave a less-than-ideal response when asked about this during a 2023 DealBook Summit interview in New York.
"If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself," he declared, adding: "Don’t advertise."
Then there's Twitter's daily app users, which have been declining.
Users in the US had fallen by 23 percent between November 2022 and February 2024, according to data from app-monitoring company Sensor Tower.
But the social media site haemorrhaged a record 115,000 US users alone the day after the 2024 presidential election ballot, won by Donald Trump.
Musk, an outspoken supporter of the president-elect, has since been appointed the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency.
People have been migrating to alternative sites since Musk's takeover, but there's one in particular that's really taken off.
Bluesky has now more than certified itself as a legitimate alternative, as it quickly surpassed 24 million users (at the time of writing), no doubt thanks to a long list of celebrities who made the jump.
A former Twitter project, Bluesky was created by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019.
Created as an 'open and decentralised standard for social media', the company became independent two years later and is now mainly owned by chief executive and software engineer Jay Graber.
UNILAD has contacted Twitter for comment.