Plunging U.S. revenue at X risks opening up a "massive hole" on its balance sheet that Musk needs to plug to stave off its financial collapse.
Musk’s repeated outbursts against advertisers have dried up the main source of revenue for the loss-making company formerly known as Twitter. A recent decision to sue them for heeding his own advice to not buy ads on the platform hasn’t helped. At some point, he will have to provide a fresh infusion of cash to salvage his $44 billion takeover.
That’s because it is almost exclusively tied up in his various corporate holdings that include everything from rocket builder SpaceX and brain chip company Neuralink to his latest startup, xAI.
None of these investments are easily fungible. Only Tesla is a publicly traded company. So the easiest solution at his fingertips is to liquidate a portion of his remaining 12% stake.
Maybe if he was smart, he'd just give up on the social network and sell it off to someone else. But he's not smart, so he'll keep sinking money into it until cooler heads in the company prevail.
The era of social media dominance, I'm sorry to say, is over.
Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
From when he bought twitter:
Mr. Musk has set some ambitious goals for Twitter, which he has said he will transform into an “everything app” called X. In presentations to investors about the deal this spring, he said he anticipated that Twitter would reach annual revenue of $26.4 billion and have 931 million users by 2028.
Uhh, not even close Musk. I guess he still has 3 years and 4 months to turn it around though. lol. I was told this man was a business genius.
Why do you think he strongarmed Teslas shareholders into that big pay day? He's known this was coming, y'all. Tesla's just paying for his misadventure.
Whats interesting is the NRA spent billions in TV propaganda running a news channel and that venture ended up bankrupting the whole organization. It looks like musk is falling in the same trap
Or maybe Twitter's debtors can place a lien and sell it right out from under him.
Kinda curious about what if Twitter were nationalized...? Like, make it a service of the USPS or something? Force it to become accountable to its users?