SAN JOSE: According to media reports, Elon Musk is unsatisfied with the business of his online platform X.
“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,“ the Wall Street Journal on Friday quoted from an a recent email to X employees, reported German news agency dpa.
Musk responded hours later to the article: “This report is false. I sent no such email. WSJ is lying.”
In the meantime, however, the technology blog The Verge confirmed the email with its own source.
The Wall Street Journal only mentioned the tech billionaire’s reaction in an update to the article, alongside the unchanged quote and a note that they had seen the email.
Musk often accuses the media of lying and spreading propaganda. Instead, he preaches to X users: “You are the media now.”
X was built upon the microblogging service Twitter, which Musk bought in October 2022 for around $44 billion. Because the company has not been listed on the stock exchange since then, there is no publicly accessible information on how the business is faring.
It is known, however, that revenues plummeted after the takeover. Musk has said several times that the revenues have roughly halved. Exactly how much X currently earns is not known.
The purchase by the polarising billionaire had already deterred some advertisers. More jumped ship after online researchers demonstrated how their adverts could appear alongside posts with hate speech.
Musk largely lifted the content restrictions for posts that were in place at Twitter.
The X chief appointed by Musk, Linda Yaccarino, who was once responsible for advertising at the media company NBC Universal, has stated several times since 2023 that advertisers are returning to the platform.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company Meta is beginning to place adverts on its X alternative, Threads.
Initially, it is planned in a limited capacity test, it was stated in a blog post.
Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users and could thus be attractive to X advertisers, but Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he would also roll back content restrictions for posts – and with the changed hate speech rules, advertisers could face similar problems as with X.
