On the evening of December 17th, Beijing time, as the owner of social platform X (formerly Twitter), Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a fortune after the US presidential election and became the world's first billionaire with a net worth of over $400 billion, but X platform suffered. It is expected that X platform will continue to lose millions of users next year.
It is obvious to all that after the US presidential election, Platform X is losing a large number of users.
The knock-on effects of the election season, and Musk’s support for Donald Trump, resulted in a flood of misinformation and toxic rhetoric being forced into users’ feeds on Platform X. As a result, Bluesky, an alternative to Platform X, saw a sudden surge in user registrations and daily active users.
Bluesky is a decentralized social application founded by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of X platform. On November 20, Bluesky said that its number of users has exceeded 20 million.
This may seem like a blip for Platform X, seemingly a temporary reaction to the election results. However, the latest data suggests that X’s woes are much deeper than a temporary post-election downturn.
Even before the election, Platform X had been steadily losing users, and, on its current trajectory, millions more were poised to leave over the next year.
Election Day traffic is just a blip
X has always seen a significant increase in traffic and daily active users due to major current events. Elections, especially the US presidential election, are the main traffic driver for X.
This year is no exception. Data from SimilarWeb shows that at least on Election Day and a day or two after the election, Platform X traffic increased significantly.
However, in the run-up to the election, X’s daily active users have been declining. Throughout October, X’s daily active users in the U.S. have been declining, ranging from 300,000 to 2.6 million per day. Since the beginning of October, X’s U.S. daily active users have fallen from 32.3 million to 29.6 million, a drop of 8.4%.
Continue to lose users in 2025
Data released by SimilarWeb in September this year showed that Platform X lost nearly one-fifth of its daily active users in the past year, with similar downward trends seen in the UK and the EU.
Analysts expect this downward trend to continue until 2025. Analysts at research firm Emarketer predict that from 2022, when Musk acquires the X platform, X is expected to lose 7 million monthly active users in the United States by 2025.
At the same time, X's brand and value have shrunk significantly. Brand Finance, a brand asset evaluation platform, estimates that X's brand value is currently about $673 million. Before Musk acquired it in 2022, X was worth as much as $5.7 billion.
At the same time, an internal company data from June this year showed that X's revenue fell 40% from the same period last year. To be precise, in the first six months of 2023, Musk's first full year of control of the X platform, X's revenue was only $1.48 billion, a year-on-year decrease of nearly 40%.
This is mainly due to the loss of advertisers. Twitter manager Siddharth Rao said in January 2023 that more than 500 advertisers have fled the platform since Musk took over X in October 2022.
Musk is making a fortune
In contrast, Musk, the owner of the X platform, made a fortune after the US election.
Yesterday (Monday), Tesla's stock price closed at $463.02 per share, up 6%. Since November 5, the US presidential election day, Tesla's stock price has risen by about 73%, and has risen by about 86% this year.
Last week, Musk's personal net worth surpassed $400 billion, making him the world's first person, thanks to the surge in the value of Tesla, AI startup xAI, and SpaceX, a space exploration technology company. SpaceX in particular was valued at about $350 billion in recent insider stock sales, and Musk owns 42% of the company.
Currently, Musk tops the list of the world's richest people with a personal net worth of $474 billion, followed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with personal net worths of $251 billion and $221 billion, respectively.