What’s happened
Elon Musk (52) recently tweeted several times that his social media network X (formerly Twitter) is number one in the App Store.
And what really happened
The tweets are deceptive. The reasons for the briefly booming interest in the app – which has now slipped back to 27th place even in the USA – are not very glamorous: On the one hand, deepfake images of the pop star Taylor Swift (34) and an alleged porn clip of the rapper Drake ( 37). On the other hand, the ex-Fox News agitator Tucker Carlson (54) published a fireside chat with war criminal Vladimir Putin on the X platform, in which the Russian president was able to spread his propaganda virtually undisturbed.
The temporary top spot in the rankings obscures the actual trend: Twitter’s successor X has been in decline since Musk took over. Data from the analysis platform Similarweb shows a drop in Germany from 130 million visits in the month before the takeover (October 2022) to just 106 million visits per month.
The trend coincides a study
, according to which the number of tweets from active users has fallen by 25 percent. This is hardly surprising: halfway civil discussions are hardly possible on X anymore. NGOs complain about an increase in racist content. According to an investigation, remained 98 percent
of randomly examined posts on X online in which, for example, the Holocaust was denied or Nazis were glorified.
Why X has also become a financial disaster
Advertising revenue has plummeted as a result of the changes to X – apparently by around 40 percent. Musk has significantly reduced the company’s costs. But with the takeover, Musk saddled the platform with $13 billion in debt. The annual interest payments alone amount to around 1.5 billion dollars.
Just to pay that off, he would need at least 15 million users who pay $8 per month for X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue). In fact, the number is probably far less than a million X-Premium subscribers. So despite the severe savings, X continues to burn money.
Why the decline of X is a problem for Elon Musk
The richest man in the world is in danger of losing his “Midas touch”: the reputation that Elon Musk can turn everything he touches into gold. The billionaire entrepreneur has earned many times more than their investment for his investors in Tesla and SpaceX. He managed to popularize electric cars and land rockets on an autonomous boat in the sea. The Twitter purchase, on the other hand, threatens to become a disaster: Investor Fidelity now has a rating of X by 71.5 percent
reduced compared to the original rating when purchasing.
This looks bad, especially compared to X’s competitors. While
In concrete terms, the X disaster also has a negative effect on the other Musk companies: Ultimately, Musk can only finance X’s negative cash flow through the sale of Tesla or SpaceX shares.
What happens next with X?
X’s decline is happening slowly. This is also because Musk still benefits from the fact that Jack Dorsey (47) made Twitter the platform most frequently cited by the media in news. This keeps X at a level in the public discussion that the platform no longer actually occupies. As soon as the media starts quoting the posts on Threads, which now plays in the same league as X with more than 130 million users, that would accelerate the decline even further.
In general, you shouldn’t be fooled by the fact that X is slowly losing its importance. What has grown exponentially through network effects also shrinks logarithmically: once these effects dissipate, the exodus can happen very quickly. See: StudiVZ. Or MySpace.
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