It's already apparent to anyone who's paying attention that X, formerly known as Twitter is not what it once was. There have been reports about the company's value dropping but it's only now that an official report from the company has emerged. X is officially worth less than half of its acquisition price.
Overpaid and Dropping in Value
X owner Elon Musk might not be regretting his purchase yet, but it's undeniable that he did not get a good deal. Even in the beginning, the tech billionaire was aware that he was overpaying for the acquisition of Twitter as he bought it for $44 billion.
Back in March, the Tesla CEO said in an email that he believes the company is only worth $20 billion. Still, he agreed to purchase Twitter at $54.20 a share. Musk then called Twitter an "inverse start-up," as reported by The New York Times.
Now, the acquisition is looking more like a mistake as the company's value has dropped to $19 million, which is 55% less than what Musk spent. It's been a year since the deal was concluded, and that's all the time it took for the company to see this significant dip in value.
This is not a surprise given that Elon Musk has been making a series of bad decisions ever since he took up the role of CEO, even well after he already assigned the executive position to Linda Yaccarino.
It was also a bad sign that in order to finalize the payment for the acquisition, Musk went into debt worth billions of dollars. To try and reduce the expenses for the company, the X owner reduced its workforce by 80%.
Some of the employees chose to quit as well due to the working conditions set by Musk. It was from there that things started to go downhill. Due to the lack of staff, Twitter, now X, started to experience issues within the app. Moderation was among the aspects that were greatly impacted.
Due to moderation becoming lax along with Musk wanting the site to be a haven for "free speech," there was an uptick in insensitive and derogatory posts on the platform. This led to several big advertisers leaving, eventually causing more financial problems for X.
Features and Policies That Shouldn't Have Happened
Looking back at all the changes that happened on the platform as Musk took over, there are a couple of them that probably made things worse for the company. The verification system, for one, angered a lot of users.
Musk announced that the legacy blue check will no longer be given to legacy users who earned it for being a known individual in their fields. Instead, those who subscribe to X Premium, previously known as Twitter Blue, will have that tag.
There's also the fact that they intentionally slowed down load times for external links to news publications and platforms that Musk personally dislikes. This caused the affected sites to load 5 seconds longer than they should, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
