- Elon Musk himself had said in 2023 that X's revenue was down.
- Now we have numbers to back it up.
- X revenues plunged 40% in the months after Elon Musk took over, Bloomberg reported.
Elon Musk was right: X did lose lots of revenue when he took over.
X revenues plunged in the wake of Elon Musk's fraught acquisition of the social media giant, new documents obtained by Bloomberg reportedly show.
According to regulatory filings seen by Bloomberg, X generated $1.48 billion in revenue in the first half of 2023 — down roughly 40% from the first six months of 2022 before Musk's takeover.
Musk completed his $44 billion Twitter purchase in October 2022.
The docs obtained by Bloomberg also show X lost $456 million in the first quarter of 2023.
X responded to a request for comment from Business Insider with an auto-reply stating, "Busy now, please check back later."
Musk's relationship with the advertising community — where X makes most of its money — has been strained.
At an event in 2023, he infamously told advertisers to go "fuck" themselves after several — including Disney, IBM, Apple, and Lionsgate — abandoned the platform following a post by Musk that was criticized as antisemitic.
Advertisers also fled last year as reports revealed that certain ads were appearing against white supremacist and antisemitic content.
The documents obtained by Bloomberg were filed by X to state regulators in its quest to build a Venmo-esque, peer-to-peer payment platform.
Also of note in the filings, according to Bloomberg: despite Musk's longstanding interest in cryptocurrency, X Payments told Maine regulators that it has no plans to facilitate transactions with virtual currencies.
Musk, a cofounder of PayPal, has outlined a grander vision for X as an "everything" app, where users could base their "entire financial world."
He's previously floated a high-yield savings feature to incentivize users to keep money on X.