We now know just how much money Elon Musk's X made after his takeover — and it's a lot less than before his purchase
- Elon Musk himself said in 2023 that X's revenue was down.
- Now we have numbers to back it up.
Elon Musk was right: X did lose a lot of revenue when he took over.
The company's revenues plunged in the wake of his fraught acquisition of the social-media giant, Bloomberg reported, citing documents it obtained.
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.
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 saying, "Busy now, please check back later."
Musk's relationship with the advertising community — from which X makes most of its money — has been strained.
At an event last year, 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 Bloomberg obtained: Despite Musk's long-standing interest in cryptocurrency, X Payments told Maine regulators that it had 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 he said users could base their "entire financial world."
He's previously floated a high-yield savings account on X to incentivize users to keep money on the platform.