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Elon Musk has stewarded Twitter to a 71.5% loss of its value since taking over the company in late 2022, according to Fidelity.
According to a new disclosure that ran through the end of November, Fidelity — who helped Musk fund the purchase of Twitter for $44 billion — “believes that the company is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase,” according to Axios.
The investment firm cut its valuation of X by about 10.7 percent in November alone, from an estimated $6.3 million at the end of October to just under $5.6 million by the end of the following month, according to a recent filing. [via The Hill]
The staggering devaluation of Twitter, which Musk has attempted and failed to rebrand as “X”, comes just a few months after the controversial multi-billionaire told current and potential advertisers to “go f— themselves” while at The New York Times DealBook Summit in late November.
“If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f‑‑‑ yourself. Go f‑‑‑ yourself. Is that clear? Hope it is,” Musk boldly said while wearing a leather jacket.
There was also a series of reports from the watchdog group Media Matters for America, which claimed to have found ads for prominent brands placed next to pro-Nazi, far-right, and white nationalist content on Twitter, leading to an exodus of brands such as Apple, Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM, Fox Sports, Axios, TechCrunch, and more.
Musk’s hostility toward the advertisers and attempts at rebranding the social media site are just two of the many missteps he’s made as owner of the company.
For example, after claiming that his decision to remove Twitter’s previous verification system was a way to curb the proliferation of bot accounts on the website, a report from The Guardian in September found that “bots on Twitter worse than ever according to analysis of 1m tweets during first Republican debate.”
Not only are there more bots, but the effectiveness of finding reliable news on Twitter via its previous verification system has now also been entirely eroded.
All of those things combined, in just about 15 months of ownership has led to Fidelity deciding that the company has now lost nearly three-quarters of its value.
Things haven’t been going much better for Musk at Tesla, either, as the company wiped out nearly one-fifth of its value back in November, per Bloomberg. That devaluation came just a year after Tesla lost more than 65% of its equity value in 2022.