Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars back in 2022. It’s now worth less than a quarter of that, according to new financial disclosures from investment firm Fidelity.
As first spotted by Techcrunch, recently released financial documents from an investor showed X Holdings Corp 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 the value of that investment has fallen more than 78% since then to $4.19 billion.
This is not the first time the investment firm has cut its hair on social media. Its financial disclosures reflect the history of X’s valuation slide. A year after its initial investment in 2022, the stock is down 65% and continues to slide in all financial disclosures. At the end of July, Fidelity estimated its holdings at $5.5 billion.
It’s easy to see why. Most of Twitter’s biggest advertisers fled when it became X. The changes Musk made to the site drove away regular people, allowed bots to flourish, and filled people’s feeds with weird Nazi and pseudo-Nazi content. A car company doesn’t want to advertise cars over a post from a lowly fan weirdo with an anime avatar calling for genocide.
When confronted with this in an interview at the end of last year, Musk told the marketers to go get their hands on it. “If someone is going to try to deceive me with advertising, kidnap me with money, go and play for yourself,” he said.
If advertisers don’t come back, Musk says, the company will die.
“That’s what everyone in the world will know. We will be gone, and it will be because of the boycott of advertisers.” The message, shockingly, did not win back the advertisers. Musk’s right-wing political position did not endear him to the public or advertisers. He has spent the past few months tweeting conspiracy theories about immigration and throwing money at a pro-Trump PAC.
IX lost more users over the summer when it was taken offline in Brazil. Musk went to war with a judge in the country before finally agreeing to his demands. But the damage was already done, millions of users in Brazil started accounts on other sites and it remains to be seen if they will return to the platform.
Musk, who calls himself a free speech absolutist, is fighting Brazil over what he calls censorship. However X banned reporter Ken Klippenstein from the site after he published a dossier on JD Vance that he obtained from Iranian hackers. The site has blocked access to material and flagged it as “potentially harmful” when people tried to share it.
When X was on Twitter during the 2020 presidential election, he pulled a similar crackdown on files pulled from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Musk called it an act of censorship, bought the company, and published the lengthy “Twitter Files” that he said revealed a conflict between the highest levels of government and the social media platform.
Four years later and X does 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.