Unbelievable: The value of X falls below $10 billion and continues to plummet
. It is now worth less than a quarter of that, according to a new financial disclosure from investment firm Fidelity.
As reported by TechCrunch, recently published investor disclosures show that X Holdings Corp has experienced a significant decrease in value. When Musk bought Twitter two years ago, Fidelity invested $19.66 billion in the company through its Blue Chip Fund. At present, Fidelity estimates that the value of that investment has fallen more than 78% since then, to $4.19 billion.
This is not an isolated fact
It is not the first time that the investment firm has suffered a loss with the social network. Their financial reports show a history of X’s value decline. One year after their initial investment in 2022, the value had dropped by 65% and continues to slide with each financial disclosure. By the end of July, Fidelity valued their investments at $5.5 billion.
It’s easy to see why. Most major advertisers on Twitter fled. The changes Musk made to the site drove away regular users, allowed bots to proliferate, and filled feeds with Nazi and pseudo-Nazi content. A car company doesn’t want to advertise on a post by an anonymous user with an anime avatar calling for genocide.
When confronted about this in an interview late last year, Musk told advertisers, “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go to hell,” he said.
If advertisers don’t come back, Musk claimed, the company will die.
“That’s what everyone on Earth will know. We will disappear, and it will be due to an advertiser boycott.” Surprisingly, the message did not bring back advertisers. Musk’s political shift to the right has also not endeared him to the public or advertisers. In recent months, he has been tweeting conspiracy theories about immigration and allocating money to a pro-Trump PAC.
And the fall continued…
X lost even more users over the summer when it was disconnected in Brazil. Musk clashed with a judge in the country. But the damage was already done; millions of users in Brazil started accounts on other sites, and it is still unknown if they will return to the platform.
Musk, who has proclaimed himself an absolutist of free speech, was fighting with Brazil over what he called censorship. However, after he posted a file on J.D. Vance obtained from Iranian hackers. The site has blocked access to the material and marked it as “potentially harmful” when people try to share it.
When X was Twitter during the 2020 presidential elections, a similar thing was done to suppress files extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Musk called it an act of censorship, bought the company, and published extensive “exposes” that, according to him, revealed collusion between the highest levels of government and the social network.
Four years later, X is doing exactly the same thing again. But now Twitter is X, the politicians at the center of the hacked documents controversy are Republicans, not Democrats, and Musk’s company is worth $9.4 billion instead of the $44 billion he paid for it.
This article has been translated from Gizmodo US by Lucas Handley. You can find the original version here.
