During an employee all-hands, Musk said that Twitter became X to replace YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and even your bank.
The boys are back in town, baby. Musk appeared on a special episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the first two hours of which are available on X (usually, the interview would be exclusive to Spotify, aside from clips). It’s mostly just bros being bros, but if you thought we were going to get out of this unscathed, Musk does throw in a little Soros conspiracy theorizing.
Fidelity, which put $300 million into Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter a year ago, thinks the company is about 65 percent less valuable now, according to Axios. That implies a valuation of between $15 and $16 billion, or the incineration of over $28 billion in enterprise value.
Musk didn’t acknowledge X’s financial state during a rare all-hands meeting with employees last week, though he did brag about some other numbers: he said that X is seeing roughly half a billion posts and over 100 billion impressions per day.
Elon Musk says the change is meant to “maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.”
A study earlier this month found X Premium verified users were getting heavy engagement as “superspreaders of misinformation” about the Israel-Hamas war.
We have some pretty good costume ideas for Apple’s Scary Fast event on Monday. We also have big ideas about the future of Threads, Mastodon, and year two of Elon Musk’s Twitter. And during one of the ad breaks, we watched the entire Blade: Trinity trailer. For some reason. It’s The Vergecast!
This was his advice to employees during his first companywide meeting since renaming Twitter to X: “In any given meeting, make sure there is at least one piece of bad news. You can have more than one piece of bad news. If you’re in a meeting with me, always bring up at least one bit of bad news or more than that.”
I have more from inside X’s first big all hands with Musk and Linda Yaccarino in this week’s Command Line:
It’s been a year of personal grudges, harebrained rebrands, and jolting policy shifts. And those aren’t even the worst parts.
X marks the spot, now located far below where it was last year ever since Elon Musk started meddling. The WSJ maps the decline in terms of active users, app downloads, ad money spent, and perceived value using lots of easy to understand charts.
