The financial situation at Twitter is dire, as Bloomberg News reports it, with the company expecting to make only $2.5bn in ad revenue in 2023. This is “a significant slump from prior years” and less than a fifteenth of the $44bn that Elon Musk paid for the company in 2022.
Last year, Twitter raked in more than $1 billion in ad revenue per quarter, sources said. But in each of the first three quarters of 2023, X only managed to produce “a little more than $600 million” in ad revenue. Now, the most recent advertiser fallout over antisemitic content on X—estimated in November as triggering a sudden $75 million loss—is still casting a shadow on what could become an even more dismal fourth quarter.
The company, officially renamed X, is insisting it now be considered a different one entirely from Twitter to formally obviate such comparisons with past performance.
[“head of X business operations” Joe] Benarroch also made it clear that X is no longer interested in being compared to Twitter. According to Bloomberg, Benarroch said that X is an “evolving NEW global business with multiple revenue streams. We are not Twitter any longer and not measuring ourselves by old Twitter metrics—both in revenue and user metrics.”
I’m almost done calling it “Twitter” at this point, it’s true. The thing is this: when it finally gets sold for whatever it’s worth, it’ll likely be renamed back to Twitter. I’ve yet to hear anyone call it X—in real life, voiced with their flapping meat—but I didn’t hear many people call it Twitter either because normal people don’t talk about any of this bullshit in real life to begin with.
Total revenue is about $3.4 billion, with the extra $900m accounted for by “subscriptions and data licensing deals,” according to Bloomberg. It reported $5.1 billion in 2021. Jack Dorsey had expected it to make $7.5 billion in 2023.
