Bloomberg reports that Fidelity lowered the value of its stake in X again in February. Its valuation has now dropped by 73% since the takeover in 2022.
Fortune reports that X's 2023 ad sales, totaling $2.5 billion, were well short of its target of $3 billion.
Matt Levine covered lawsuits from former Twitter executives a few weeks ago, who are suing Musk and X for $128 million in unpaid severance.
NBC reports that US daily active users have fallen by nearly a fifth since Musk's takeover. This exceeds declines in this metric for other major platforms over the same period:
In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.
The numbers were nearly as bad worldwide, as daily active users on the mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, the firm said. The worldwide user base has been flat or down every month during Musk’s tenure began except one, when it grew slightly in October and then resumed falling, according to Sensor Tower. Other social media apps experienced modest increases in their worldwide user bases during the same period. [...] Those apps all experienced declines over that period in the U.S., but none was as steep as the decline on X.
Downloads are also down.
There's already an Atlas thread on a judge
tossing X's lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate:
Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.
Alternate Twitter front-ends are still going strong despite X's attempts to shut them down.
This Nitter instance has been working consistently for months.
TechCrunch reports that X may be looking to smut as a growth center:
A day after researchers surfaced X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered. Otherwise, all NSFW content will be soon filtered across X’s Communities by default. Communities are X’s smaller groups with their own feeds outside of the main timeline.
The article mentions a desire to compete with Reddit, which has put more restrictions on NSFW content over the past few years, and may become more less accommodating of this content post-IPO.
