In Leaked Email, Elon Musk Admits Defeat on Twitter

"Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even."

Cutting Losses

Banks,  that loaned multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk an appreciable $13 billion for his ill-advised $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 are getting ready to offload billions of debt they accrued as a result, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The hope is to minimize the hurt as they sell off the debt, a massive scar haunting the mercurial CEO's disastrous social media platform shopping spree.

And after a chaotic couple of years, and Musk seemingly doing his best to wipe out what was left of the platform's largely ad-dependant revenue with increasingly erratic behavior, X-formerly-Twitter's finances have yet to recover. The company is still drowning in accumulated debt while loaners are struggling with massive interest payments.

In short, the financials are still looking pretty dire — as Musk himself admitted in a January email to staff reviewed by the WSJ.

"Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even," he admitted.

Scraping By

Musk's own actions, including racist tirades, tantrums, and personal insults, sent advertisers — the platform's top source of revenue — running for the hills.

X has maintained that its financials are improving, with brands coming back to advertise on the platform, the WSJ reports.

But as the increasingly hate speech-filled microblogging site continues to embrace what it claims to be "free speech," several key competitors, including Meta's Threads and Twitter alternative Bluesky, have emerged.

Both platforms have seen a dramatic influx of new users fleeing Twitter, indicating widespread disillusionment with Musk's disdain for content moderation and embrace of the extreme far right.

Now that Musk has catapulted himself onto the political world stage by throwing himself at Trump's feet, banks are seemingly seeing this moment as an opportunity to sell their debt without incurring huge losses.

In short, Musk's acquisition of Twitter remains a major blemish on his resume.

At the same time, the platform has turned out to be a powerful tool for pumping out a firehose of hate speech, state propaganda, and disinformation. And who knows how much that's worth to Musk or Trump?

"Over the last few months, we’ve witnessed the power of X in shaping national conversations and outcomes," Musk wrote in the email.

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