Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, but it’s now worth less than a quarter of that amount, according to new financial disclosures from investment firm Fidelity.
As first spotted by Techcrunch, newly released financial documents to investors show X Holdings Inc. is taking a haircut. When Musk bought Twitter two years ago, Fidelity invested $19.66 billion in the company through its blue chip fund. As of this writing, Fidelity estimates that its investment has plummeted more than 78% since then to $4.19 billion.
This is not the first time an investment firm has restricted the use of social media sites. The company’s financial disclosures show a history of declining Company X valuations. A year after the initial investment in 2022, its value has fallen by 65% and continues to fall with each financial disclosure. At the end of July, Fidelity valued its holdings at $5.5 billion.
The reason is simple. Most of Twitter’s big advertisers fled when Twitter became X. The changes Musk made to the site drove away ordinary people, allowed bots to flourish, and filled people’s feeds with bizarre Nazi and Nazi-like content. Car companies don’t want to advertise their cars over posts by weirdos with little followers wearing cartoon avatars who call for genocide.
When confronted with this in an interview late last year, Mr. Musk told advertisers to “fuck off.” “If anyone tries to blackmail me with an ad or blackmail me with money, fuck you,” he said.
Musk said his company would go out of business if advertisers didn’t come back.
“Everyone on the planet knows it. We’re leaving, and it’s going to be because of an advertiser boycott.” Shockingly, this message didn’t bring advertisers back. Ta. Mr. Musk’s political shift to the right was unpopular with the public and advertisers. In recent months, he has tweeted conspiracy theories about immigration and funneled money to pro-Trump PACs.
X lost even more users when it went offline in Brazil over the summer. Mr. Musk waged war with the country’s judges, but ultimately succumbed to their demands. But the damage has already been done, with millions of users in Brazil opening accounts on other sites, and it remains to be seen whether they will return to the platform.
Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, has been at loggerheads with Brazil over what he calls censorship. However, X banned journalist Ken Klippenstein from the site after he published documents about J.D. Vance obtained from Iranian hackers. The site has since blocked access to the material and marked it as “potentially harmful” if people try to share it.
When X was on Twitter during the 2020 presidential campaign, he pulled files from Hunter Biden’s laptop and committed a similar act of oppression. Calling this an act of censorship, Mr. Musk bought the company and published lengthy “Twitter files” that revealed collusion between the highest levels of government and the social media site.
Four years later, X is doing the exact same thing again. But now Twitter is an There is.
