I think you should look at the facts and that is that X is both way more in the media than before - both in a good and a bad way - and the userbase has grown while a significant portion of operational expenses have been cut.
That first article entirely revolves around some random finance bro’s idle speculation in a YouTube comment. It blows my mind that people are so trusting of obvious guess work given that it’s a privately held company that’s not disclosing their financials.
> That first article entirely revolves around some random finance bro’s idle speculation in a YouTube comment.
I'm not sure that's a wholly accurate description? The article appears to point to sources beyond that singular comment - in particular, ostensible internal financial information:
> Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
> That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.
Profit is the whole point of owning a company, unless it's run by an oligarch, like is the case with Twitter. Not too dissimilar from Abramovich or another Sheriff from Moldova owning a sports club.
He can afford it as long as the stock market remains convinced Tesla deserve to be the most valuable car company in the world while being outside the top ten in sales ...
(I count "can make Starship on the side" as a QED of "making bank").
Regardless of how Starship concludes, when it does so it saves them ongoing costs, and turns "small profit" into "huge profit": either Falcon becomes redundant, or the R&D team does.
Most of those 'users' are probably bots though. The bot activity has increased massively since Musk has bought the company (just look at all the like-bots nobody seems to do anything about).
How would you determine if the userbase has grown when by most accounts there has been an explosion in the number of bots while advertising revenue has plummeted by 80%?
Do you have a source for that? Many of the accounts that I follow on twitter are now completely dead. I think most of them are not deleted, but they have basically no activity. This is of course very subjective, but is there any reliable data how many active user x now has?
The X user base has shrunk dramatically, which is the main reason major consumer companies have dropped their ad spend there. They were getting far less for their money and effort and hassle. It’s also why Trump has not bothered to come back to his (now un-banned) account there.
X also receives far less media exposure than Twitter used to. For example in the U.S. about a decade ago, it was common for every ad and news broadcast to include the Twitter icon with their Twitter handle on the screen. Entire movies were made with Twitter as a central plot element (e.g. Jon Favreau’s Chef). Reporters were hired and fired based on the size of their Twitter audience.
None of that happens anymore. X gets a bit of news coverage primarily from random controversies and that’s it.
