X is now worth what Elon Musk bought Twitter for

Elon Musk purchased X, formerly Twitter, from its shareholders in 2022 for $44 billion. Following the purchase of the social media platform, there was an exodus of advertisers, dramatically reducing the valuation of now-X. That valuation has now reached the price at which Musk purchased the platform.

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Shortly after Musk purchased X, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO went on to make some major changes, such as how content appears on the timeline for users and what content is served next to ads. These changes, combined with Musk's opening up of the X content guidelines, which enabled a wider variety of content to appear on the platform, resulted in many advertisers being concerned their ads would appear next to potentially offensive content. These concerns resulted in the exodus of advertisers we saw in the months that followed the acquisition.

In response to the spiraling of advertisers propping up the social media platform, Musk proceeded to run intense cost-cutting measures, which saw approximately 90% of then-Twitter staff being let go. Twitter staff dropped from about 7,500 employees to just 1,500. According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Musk has since raised close to $1 billion in new equity from investors, which values the company at approximately $32 billion. The report states Musk himself participated in the equity raise, along with Darsana Capital Partners, which bought some of X's debt earlier this year.

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Recently, X posted $1.2 billion in adjusted earnings for 2024, which are before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. According to the Financial Times report, this figure is about the same as before Musk purchased the platform.