"Barely making ends meet" Musk is said to be unhappy with X business according to internal email
Elon Musk is unhappy with the business of his online platform X. According to a report in the "Wall Street Journal", he complains about stagnating user growth in an internal email to employees.
25.01.2025, 02:19
25.01.2025, 08:58
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- In an internal email, Elon Musk laments the difficult situation of X (formerly Twitter), with stagnating user growth and falling sales.
- Following the purchase for 44 billion dollars in October 2022, revenue has slumped by around half, mainly due to advertisers dropping out.
- While X CEO Linda Yaccarino is hinting at a return of advertisers, Meta is launching Threads, a potential competitor platform with over 300 million monthly active users.
Elon Musk is complaining about the business of his online platform X. "Our user growth is stagnating, revenue is not impressive - and we are barely making ends meet," the Wall Street Journal quoted from an email to employees.
There was initially no comment on the report from Musk or his appointed X boss Linda Yaccarino. X is based on the short messaging service Twitter, which Musk bought in October 2022 for around 44 billion dollars. As the company has not been listed on the stock exchange since then, there is no publicly available information on how the business is performing.
However, it is known that sales slumped after the takeover. Musk said several times that revenue had roughly halved. It is not known exactly how much Twitter is currently earning.
Fleeing advertising customers
The purchase by the polarizing tech billionaire had already scared off some advertising customers. More jumped ship after online researchers demonstrated how their ads could appear alongside posts containing hate speech. Musk had largely lifted Twitter's content restrictions on posts.
Yaccarino, who was once in charge of the ad business at media conglomerate NBC Universal, has said several times since 2023 that advertisers were returning to the platform.
Ads on Meta's threads
Meanwhile, Facebook company Meta is starting to place ads on its X alternative Threads. Initially, this is planned on a limited scale in a test, according to a blog post. Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users and could therefore be attractive for X advertisers. However, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he would also be reducing the content restrictions for posts - and with the changed hate speech rules, advertisers could face similar problems as with X.
