Fidelity marks down X (formerly Twitter) valuation by almost 72%

We know that ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it to X, it has not seen a day where the platform has gone on without any changes and most of them are controversial as well. We have seen that Elon Musk’s tweets have caused his company to suffer and advertisers have boycotted it as well. The only change I have personally liked about the current form of X, formerly Twitter, is the addition of context added by readers which helps everyone understand the context of the tweet better and also fact-check it so that fake tweets are not spread very easily.

The biggest challenge for the company is to convince advertisers to spend money on the platform. A lot of prominent advertisers — including Apple, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM, Paramount Global, Lionsgate, and the European Commission — pulled out from the platform after Musk called an antisemitic conspiracy theory the “actual truth.”

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” Musk continued. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”.  A report from earlier in 2023 mentioned that “X will look to appease small and medium businesses to spend ad money on the platform. X contested The New York Times’ claim that the platform will lose $75 million because of an advertiser boycott and told FT that the estimated drop would be around $10-12 million”.

He also added that “Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time. It [was] always part of the plan — now we will go even further with it,” The report added that Elon Musk “has also made controversial decisions to restore accounts of previously banned users such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Kanye West, former U.S. President Donald Trump, far-right influencer Andrew Tate and right-wing academic Jordan Peterson”.

It is worth noting that “X has gone through quite a lot of changes in the past year, including getting a new CEO in former NBCU exec Linda Yaccarino. During an interview at the Code Conference in September 2023, Yaccarino claimed that the company would turn profitable in 2024”.