• by Colin Kirkland , January 2, 2024

X, formerly known as Twitter, has lost over 71% of its value since April 2022, when Elon Musk bought the microblogging app, according to mutual fund Fidelity, a shareholder in X Holdings.

Fidelity -- which contributed over $300 million to Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover -- originally marked down the company's valuation in October, which decreased the value of its investment by nearly 65% over the first eleven months of Musk's ownership.

Things have only become worse for Musk's app. After firing the majority of the platform's content moderators while touting a rebranded mission of “free speech,” hateful and misinformed content has spiked on X, with the company's new content-moderation strategies only perpetuating the issue.

Musk has also reinstated a number of banned accounts that belong to former president Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who was found guilty of defaming the families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims.

The number of monthly users on X has dropped by around 15% over the past year, and the app's biggest advertising partners have deserted or paused their ad spend. Some major companies like Disney and Comcast are now redirecting their ad budgets to competing social apps.

Media buyers' reallocation of ad spend is creating a higher demand and driving up ad prices on other platforms as well. On LinkedIn, ad prices have increased as much as 30% over the past year.

“This is LinkedIn season,” Leesha Anderson, vice president of digital marketing and social media at Outcast ad agency, recently told the Financial Times. “Most have switched over to LinkedIn over the past year . . . A few weeks ago most of our clients were off X. Now they are all off X.”

Fidelity's most recent estimate places the value of X at about $12.5 billion, according to a disclosure that ran to the end of November 2023, Axios reported.

The valuation includes a 10.7% cut during November after Musk told the advertisers boycotting X to “go f*** yourself” onstage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit.