It already served its purpose. He bought it so he could control a narrative, used it to boost right wing voices, used it to capture media for the purposes of suppressing dissent to win an election. He took Russian and Saudi money to buy the platform for the expressed purpose of getting Trump elected.
According to analysts at Emarketer, from when Musk acquired X in 2022 until 2025, they expect X to have lost 7 million monthly active users in the U.S.
The declining user base pales in comparison to the decline of X's brand and value. According to a recent report from Brand Finance, X's brand is now worth 673 million. The brand was valued at $5.7 billion before Musk's takeover in 2022. When it comes to revenue, X's revenue fell by 40 percent when compared to the prior year based on internal company data from June 2024.
Or if you prefer to be a lot more cynical, he Old Yeller'd it, but he burned it's equity to get himself elected Co-President, and is worth like a hundred billion dollars more than he was before he did that.
So really, it was a Very Wise and bigly Smart business move.
Dude he doesn't care Twitter did exactly what he bought it to do. It can burn to the ground far as he is concerned. He bought himself a president and will be put in charge of the government that reglates his businesses. Dude going make more then he loss on Twitter .
There is a clear successor to X now, Bluesky, which means anyone not happy with X knows what their best option is.
My guess is, when X and Bluesky are roughly even in terms of active users, X's user base will start to collapse and there will be a mass exodus to Bluesky.
Which is a nice change, usually every alternative starts up exactly because the worst of the worst got banned from the original and had to migrate to somewhere else, and then it's an uphill battle for anyone else to make use of that platform.
My guess is that the user base shifts will vary by nation and language. The rate of X enshitification and migration has hit different regions at different speeds.
The writing is on the wall for US users though. Twitter is the AOL or MySpace of this decade. It’s lame and not fun anymore, and Bsky is fun and very active.
I think Elon might try to intervene in that, either by regulations favoring his platform, or industrial sabotage. Maybe even try to get into the fediverse game, so X accounts could interact with Bluesky or Mastodon ones.
I don't see how regulations can help him there, especially given the nature of the Web. Bluesky can always move offshore, beyond the reach of the US authorities.
I also imagine both Bluesky and Mastadon users will tell x users, loudly and clearly, to fuck off.
That should be a lemmy community :) I would read a good news focused lemmy, although moderating something like that would be subjective and potentially difficult.
Named after the tendency on TV to put lighthearted news pieces like these at the end, to give people something to smile about after all the depressing stuff.
It’s a story about Elon Musk: so we have a Musk silhouette.
It’s also a story about X: so there’s a big phone with an X on it
Finally, it’s a story about users: so there’s a thumb
Like the great masters of old, whoever composed this image really managed to convey the essence of this story via this image, which very much enhances the story.
This person should work for national geographic. So poignant. So gripping. So utterly arresting.
I think it's the medium, it's so centered around persons and talking heads, that doesn't gel with me. Software technically I like Mastodon, but I feel like I lose interest in checking it compared to Lemmy.