When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X, he pitched the platform as the future “everything app.” But several years later, the numbers suggest that Musk's vision for X must have been oversold because the company isn’t justifying the hype it first had since Musk’s takeover.
For starters, user engagement on the once dominant platform is diminishing. As of Q2 2025, X’s daily user base reached 132 million, but its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%. Meanwhile, competition is growing cutthroat by the second: by early 2026 Meta’s Threads had already edged out X at 141.5 million in terms of mobile daily users compared to X’s 125 million. In addition, newer platforms such as Bluesky continue to chip away at X’s cultural relevance.
Amid the ever-changing landscape of social media, X’s earnings have failed to regain momentum and managed to generate roughly $2.5 billion in revenue in 2024, a 13.7% decline from the previous year. By 2025, revenues showed a little recovery, with Q1 sitting at $722 million only to fall at $707 million by Q2, accentuating the stagnation that continues overall.
Feeling the squeeze
The company’s finances have remained turbulent since Musk’s takeover revenue in the UK alone plunged 66.3%, falling from £205.3 million in 2022 to £69.1 million in 2023.
After an initial boost following political events in the U.S., the company reported about $707 million revenue in June 2025, a 2.2% decline from the previous quarter. The platform’s ad business remains volatile, which in the company’s history had been its key growth driver. The weakness isn’t limited to advertising either, in fact the platform’s mobile growth is also faltering, and it’s failing to make its mark on Android. In Q3 2025, new installs on Google Play plunged 44% year over year, dragging overall mobile downloads down to 26% annually.
The slowdown is beginning to show up in subscriptions too, with X generating $16.9 million in in-app revenue in July 2025, lower than the $18.8 million recorded in March of the same year. Even Musk himself has acknowledged the headwinds, and the billionaire admitted X’s growth had become “stagnant,” while revenue remained “unimpressive”. For a company bought for $44 billion, the reality now looks far less dazzling considering it’s now valued at about $12.3 billion, a steep drop from its acquisition price.
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