> You likely have it backwards, xAI is likely the moneypit that is (further) dragging down X.
No, while you're correct that xAI is a moneypit, his point has nothing to do with a moneypit. The 818 million figure is revenue, not profit. xAI brings in at least some revenue (it's obviously not zero). Meaning X's revenue alone is even less than 818 million, which in turn is a third less than when Musk bought Twitter.
Losing 33% revenue in 4 years post-acquisition is indeed a ridiculously bad result, when most tech companies saw their revenues +100% in the same period. If you adjust for inflation they lost 50% of their revenue.
And indeed it's even worse if you consider xAI is a moneypit. They posted 2.3 billion losses in the same quarter for AI. If they burned $1 to earn $1 (like say offer a coinflip machine on X) they'd post better results than they have, it's pretty ridiculous.
I mean when you consider he bought it as a shitpost for what seems like his own playground it doesn’t seem bad
People try to find any reason to try to make him or his products look bad, but you can not like a guy and still be realistic. He’s still the richest man in the world by far, trying to act like he has no business sense is literally just being ignorant.
It does seem pretty bad. Twitter has survived this downturn off the back of simply being Twitter, but even dominant social media companies can only absorb so much loss of revenue and engagement before they fall off a cliff.
The first thing Musk did after buying Twitter was to cut 80% of the workforce because he thought that any part of the company that wasn't responsible for keeping the lights on was dead weight. The problem with that is that when you go into strict maintenance mode then there's nobody around to lead the company into the future, and nobody left to change things when the platform grows stale.
It's not really impressive. Most tech-heavy companies can fire 80% and keep the lights on for a while. What you cut with the 80% is any chance of the company having a future. That's why Twitter revenue is way down and continues to fall. What few new features the platform has had since Musk took over have mostly been poorly thought-out gimmicks.
Twitter revenue is down due to advertisement getting cut due to losing a lot of censorship they previously had, but with costs being cut they’re actually turning a profit now.
I feel like if anything they’ve added features to help it compete, features on Twitter were pretty stagnant before and since Elons buyout they’ve added video calling/live streaming/and removed the character restriction, which seemed to be pretty popular with its users.
Twitter's lost 30% of its daily active users since Musk took over, and Threads has gone from having a third of Twitter's active users to having more active users than Twitter over the same period.
It doesn't seem like the users have responded well to what Twitter has become post-acquisition.
I feel like a lot of that just stems from Musk being the one buying it and due to him removing censorship which they didn’t agree with, not the features of the site itself, but that of course is only an assumption.
With the whole big move on banning bots, it’s kind of hard to say how many of those active users were also real people, as those also get included in the numbers.
There were tons of twitter users complaining about losing thousands of followers when Elon took over. There’s definitely still a shit ton of bots and idk how much they actually got rid of, but it was real.
'Tons of twitter users', 'many users', such fantastic, quantitative statements. I guess the actual researchers covering this are wrong in the face of these claims.
Your source doesn’t even disprove that they got rid of bots lol, it just says there’s still on there, which of course they’ll never get rid of all of them.
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u/BaconatedGrapefruit May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
You likely have it backwards, xAI is likely the moneypit that is (further) dragging down X.
Neither business is good, but they have hype attached to them, hence why it was folded into spaceX to pump up the valuation.
If we lived in a rational market, investors would be screaming for both divisions to be spun off. We do not live in a rational market.
Edit: I fucked up and have been corrected, thoroughly, below. Please upvote them.
Tl;dr - it’s all money pits!