Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion back in 2022. Now it’s worth less than a quarter of that, according to a new financial disclosure from the investment firm Fidelity.
As first spotted by Techcrunch, newly released financial documents from the investor showed X Holdings Corp taking a haircut. When Musk bought Twitter two years ago, Fidelity invested $19.66 billion dollars into the company through its Blue Chip Fund. As of this writing, Fidelity estimates the value of that investment has plummeted more than 78% since then to $4.19 billion.
This isn’t the first time the investment firm has taken a haircut on the social media site. Its financial disclosures show a history of X’s valuation sliding. A year after its initial investment in 2022, the value was down 65% and continues to slide with every financial disclosure. At the end of July, Fidelity valued its holdings at $5.5 billion.
It’s easy to see why. Most of Twitter’s big advertisers fled when it became X. Changes Musk made to the site chased away normal 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 above a post from a low-follower count weirdo with an anime avatar calling for a genocide.
When confronted by this in an interview at the end of last year, Musk told advertisers to go fuck themselves. “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” he said.
If the advertisers don’t return, Musk said, the company will die.
“That is what everybody on Earth will know. We’ll be gone, and it’ll be because of an advertisers boycott.” The message, shockingly, didn’t bring advertisers back. Musk’s right-ward political turn hasn’t endeared him to the public or advertisers either. He’s spent the last few months tweeting conspiracy theories about immigration and dumping money into a pro-Trump PAC.
X lost even more users over the summer when it was taken offline in Brazil. Musk went to war with a judge in the country before eventually capitulating to his demands. But the damage was already done, millions of users in Brazil started accounts on other sites and it’s yet to be seen if they’ll return to the platform.
Musk, who has called himself a free speech absolutist, was fighting with Brazil over what he called censorship. Yet X banned journalist Ken Klippenstein from the site after he published a dossier on J.D. Vance he obtained from Iranian hackers. The site has since 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 election, it pulled a similar act of suppression with files pulled from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Musk called it an act of censorship, bought the company, and published lengthy “Twitter Files” he said revealed the collusion between the highest levels of government and the social media site.
Four years later and X is doing the exact same thing, again. But now Twitter is X, the politicians at the center of the hacked document controversy are Republicans not Democrats, and Musk’s company is worth $9.4 billion instead of the $44 billion he paid for it.
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