Billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X, CEO of Tesla and now a key advisor in the Donald Trump administration, gave a cheeky reply to a netizen over his post on X's profit margins since he took over the social media platform.
Austen Allred, CEO of GauntletAI.com, took to X and said, "Remember how Elon bought Twitter and totally destroyed the company through his own hubris? (At least that’s what I read). Turns out it’s not only profitable, but profit has doubled since he took it private. The loans are selling at 97 cents on the dollar. They did it."
"Revenue is half of what it used to be and costs are 1/4 of what they used to be. Let the revenue continue to recover and Elon has (yet another) money gusher on his hands, he added.
Along with his post, Allred shared clippings of a Wall Street Journal article titled - "Banks sells $5.5 billion of X loans after investor interests surges".
"X reported to the investors 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion. Investors said that was a better picture than they had expected and that X's finances hit an inflection point a few months before the November election," the WSJ article read.
To this, Elon Musk, the owner of X, hilariously posted, "It’s almost like I’m good with money."
"Revenue should improve rapidly this year, as the advertising boycott winds down,” Musk said, while responding to the post discussing X’s revenue.
X was taken over by Musk as Twitter in a $44 billion deal in 2022. Since taking over the firm, Musk had fired a bulk of Twitter’s staff and radically overhauled its algorithms and moderation mechanisms, to the contention of several advertisers on the website. Musk had also introduced a paid subscription, while reinstating controversial accounts, such as President Donald Trump.
Prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter’s biggest revenue source was advertising. After the buyout, several major advertisers, including Apple Inc, had pulled their ads from the website on concerns over hate speech.
But this trend appears to be changing in recent weeks. Last week, the WSJ reported that Amazon was planning to raise its advertising spending on X.
Meanwhile, according to a recent Bloomberg report, investors are starting to get their most complete look yet at the financial picture of social media platform X in the chaotic three years since its buyout by Elon Musk.
Bankers are looking to offload about $3 billion of loans that have been stuck on their books since the debt-laden transaction in 2022. While the numbers come with a heavy dose of adjustments, they are offering potential buyers some signs of a rebound from the steep revenue losses that X was said to have suffered in the early days of Musk’s ownership, a period marked by drastic cost cuts and lost advertising revenue, Bloomberg added.
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