The total value of Elon Musk’s Twitter-X is now only $ 19 billion compared to the $ 44 billion he spent to buy.

Bloomberg news agency said Elon Musk’s Twitter-X is now worth less than half of the $ 44 billion that the Tesla founder spent to buy in 2022.

Sources close to Bloomberg said that in the recent plan to reward employees with shares, Elon Musk’s Twitter-X was only valued at about $ 19 billion.

Since Elon Musk took over the popular social network, about 80% of Twitter-X’s employees have been fired or laid off.

After changing his name to his favorite letter “X” despite many objections, the billionaire continued to make changes to content regulations and caused half of advertising revenue to evaporate as brands lost trust in Elon Musk.

Sinking into chaos

According to Bloomberg, the platform is in huge financial trouble under Elon Musk. Before it was acquired, Twitter-X was still valued at $44 billion, although business wasn’t really booming and had some debt.

However, Elon Musk’s $ 44 billion acquisition of this social network has caused Twitter-X to take on an additional $ 13 billion in debt borrowed by the Tesla founder to make the deal. Currently, the platform is paying interest on loans of $ 1.3 billion a year because of Elon Musk.

Not stopping there, the billionaire also relaxed content management, causing advertising brands to reduce their budgets for this platform for fear of affecting the brand, thereby eroding 60% of Twitter-X’s advertising revenue.

To earn new revenue, Elon Musk is trying to move to a membership service with an upgraded service with fewer ads and more features on Twitter-X.

So far, less than 1% of returning users have bought them, bringing in nearly $120 million in revenue.

In addition, the Tesla founder also tried to turn Twitter-X into a super application with e-commerce, online payment, video calling…

Elon Musk himself has expressed his ambition to turn Twitter-X into a platform competing with Youtube, LinkedIn …

During new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s recent meeting with the bank to ease debt, a series of new ideas for Twitter-X were presented but it is unclear whether Elon Musk will be able to escape the current financial chaos.

Previously, the world’s richest billionaire has expressed that he can bring Twitter-X back to the stock exchange similar to what he did with Tesla, but in the context of the current decline in the total value of the company, the plan is afraid to be difficult to implement.

The bird broke its wings

The New York Times (NYT) once described Twitter-X as a bird (the old symbol of Twitter) broke its wings when more and more people complained about Elon Musk but the billionaire did not listen.

“I used to love interacting on Twitter-X but now it’s so different. I have to witness images or posts that are unacceptably scary. So I try not to surf much on the platform anymore,” Lauren Brody, a 54-year-old human resources executive living in San Francisco, told the NYT.

Similarweb figures show that users now go to Twitter-X less frequently.

The number of visitors to the page has also decreased by 14% in the past 1 year, a sad thing for the social networking brand with the same popularity as Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat in the US.

In Europe, Elon Musk’s Twitter-X social network is being accused of violating content safety laws, thereby requiring platforms to tighten controls on fake information and violent content.

A report by the Council of the European Union (EU) shows that Elon Musk’s home platform has increased its infringing content by 36% between January and May 2023.

Even people who liked to debate on Twitter before are no longer interested in the platform when there is so much shocking information, the tension increases in the squabbles on the posts.

A good example is William Jones, a professor of neurology at the University of Utah, who often enjoys surfing Twitter-X as well as having academic debates on the platform.

But now he is bothered when Elon Musk’s social network is flooded with ads about drugs.

The professor said many of his peers have left Twitter and many of the discussion groups he used to attend are not as vibrant as they were before there were so many spam comments and offensive and misleading information.

Ted Han, a software developer in San Francisco, said he is using Twitter-X less and less because of spam and a lot of tasteless controversy.

“I feel less comfortable sharing posts on Twitter-X, and I have to think more carefully because I don’t want to get caught up in garbage controversies,” Ted said.