What has Musk done to X?

THE LATEST ON X: X’s value has plummeted 55% from USD 44 bn – when Elon Musk bought it a year ago, to USD 19 bn now, based on the stock plan issued to employees, according to Fortune. Was it Musk’s changes to policies and lack of moderation that put X in hot water with fines and ultimatums from several watchdogs. Or is it that X is not even on the CEO’s priority list? Given the several projects that he has started that have nothing to do with the formerly beloved platform.

BY THE NUMBERS– Compared to last year’s numbers, there have been 13% less users, and employee numbers dropped from 7.5k people to 1.5k people (which can be argued is a cost-saving measure by Musk).

But Musk awarded employees equity, anyway…at USD 45 per share of the USD 19 bn valuation. This comes as part of the company’s equity compensation plan based on the fair market value per share determined by the Board of Directors, aka Mr. Musk himself, Fortune adds. Aiming to model X’s compensation plan after SpaceX, Musk is allowing employees to cash out a portion of their shares, the Verge reports.

This payout does not dissuade from the fact that he is in USD 13bn in debt,he also lost advertiser revenue and is racking up interest of around USD 1.2 bn per year from the said debt.

The unbridled content is undermining the platform. Unlike Twitter, which was heralded as the go-to platform for news and free-expression,studies have shown an increase in harmful posts on X. Researchers even found a rise in “racist and ethnic slurs” and an increase in engagements with troll users.

To add fuel to the fire… incidents like the Israeli war on Gaza and the Russian war in Ukraine highlighted the platform’s descent deeper into misinformation with its changes to its policies, explains Tim Chambers of Dewey Square Group, a public affairs company that tracks social media quoted in the New York Times.

One of the unhappy watchdogs is the EU’s Digital Services Act, this body has criticized Musk for his platform’s engagement with Kremlin-linked (Russian propagandists) accounts, which increased by 36% on X after Musk removed mitigation, and warned about the circulation of violent or extremist content.

But Musk is unruffled. He continues to defend his platform stating that these activities are exaggerated and that he aspires to share the real-time truth, even if it isn’t too pleasant, the New York Times added.

Oh, remember that Premium subscription? It didn’t curb unwanted users. In fact it allowed, and still allows, anyone with USD 8 to spare to get the blue checkmark, video and audio call feature and the X feed advantage to share misinformation, explains Bloomberg. It only managed to persuade between 950 k to 1.2 mn users, anyway, — 1% of X’s user base — resulting in less than USD 120 mn in annual revenues from the subscription services. Even Fidelity, who invested USD 300 mn in the acquisition of X, has lowered its value by 65%.

With the above track record, it makes sense that 67% of advertisers are spending less on their content on X, according to Sensor Tower, cited in Bloomberg. Even Merck & Co, Hilton Worldwide, and AT&T left months after Musk took the helm.

Will turning X into a market place be its saving grace? In an attempt to restore the social media platform to its former glory, Musk is proposing to make money by changing the platform to an ‘everything app’, through a “shopping and payments” feature, but it is yet to be seen. He even voiced his intention to take X public, but he claims that he needs to bring the company back to USD 44 bn, the value at which he bought it earlier this year, reports Bloomberg.

Or does X really not matter to Mr Musk? Despite his open displeasure with AI the b’naire did not stop him from setting up xAI, which aims to “understand the true nature of the universe.” He also set up Neuralink to plant microchips into quadriplegic patients’ brains to communicate through computers.

And then there is Optimus, a “robot humanoid” designed to do “anything that humans don’t want to do” and let’s not forget that he’s also planning to go to Mars, or what he calls the red planet, by 2026.