October 27 2024 - 8:00am
As Elon Musk marks his second anniversary as Twitter/X’s owner today, his $44 billion experiment in digital democracy has produced a peculiar paradox: the platform has become simultaneously more culturally vital and financially imperiled than ever before. Rapidly shorn of most of its original workforce in a manner that impressed fellow CEOs, the platform transformed from the world’s polite town square into social media’s raucous underground fight club — a space where previously marginalized voices now brawl in plain sight with establishment figures who haven’t yet fled to safer digital shores.
By welcoming back accounts suspended by the previous regime — from Donald Trump and Alex Jones to countless anonymous accounts — Musk has transformed X. Underground subcultures built around colorful Right-leaning characters like the “Bronze Age Pervert”, “Lomez”, and “Pariah the Doll” have emerged from the shadows of smoke-filled private group chats into the mainstream discourse, creating a messier but more authentic digital space.
Given that most of the Left-liberal media and political figures who threatened to leave are still hanging around, this new incarnation of X matters precisely because it’s the last place where different ideological camps still meaningfully clash. You can, for example, watch Right-wing political science professor Wilfred Reilly trade barbs with liberal fashion influencer “The Menswear Guy”, or pick sides as Leftist publisher Nathan J. Robinson clashes with contrarian critic Wesley Yang over what The New York Times decides to publish on its op-ed page. While Facebook retreats from news sharing and contentious debate, X remains the closest approximation of a digital public square, even if it’s a more fractious one.
But the numbers are brutal and only getting worse. X’s user growth has practically flatlined — managing to add just four million new daily users over the past year, bringing the total to 251 million. For perspective, that’s a measly 1.6% increase, a far cry from the platform’s glory days when Twitter routinely posted double-digit growth.
Musk’s great subscription gambit, meant to wean the platform off its advertising addiction, is a moonshot that failed to land. Despite endless tinkering with features like Grok AI and pricing tiers, X Premium’s mobile revenue since 2021 amounts to pocket change in tech terms about $200 million total. Even with the most generous assumptions about subscriptions — imagining most users opted for the premium tier — that amounts to around 1.4 million paying customers. That’s less than 1% of X’s daily active users willing to pay for the privilege of a blue checkmark and reduced ads.
The advertising exodus tells a similarly grim story. Risk-averse marketing executives have moved away from X, with Kantar’s latest survey suggesting a quarter of them plan to slash spending next year. The platform’s brand safety rating has dropped to 4% — a number so low it makes other social media sites, hardly bastions of elevated discourse, look like squeaky clean gated communities.
When powerhouse liberal-mainstream firms like Apple and Disney, not to mention institutions like the World Bank, are pulling their ads over concerns about appearing next to extremist content (such as this 13,000-like post arguing that the world would be a better place if Germany had won the Second World War), you know something’s fundamentally broken in the business model. That said, all three of them still maintain accounts, with the World Bank posting multiple times per day. Indeed, the platform has proven remarkably resistant to replacement, despite the breathless media coverage greeting each new challenger. Neither Meta’s Threads, nor Mastodon, nor Bluesky has managed to replicate X’s unique combination of reach, simple functionality, and real-time discourse.
Two years in, X stands as social media’s most fascinating ongoing failure — a platform that succeeded in becoming exactly what its owner envisioned while hemorrhaging money in the process. It’s too culturally significant to die, yet too toxic to thrive financially. For the foreseeable future, expect X to continue its precarious and provocative existence as the internet’s last and perhaps only genuine public square. Musk might never make his $44 billion investment back, but he’s created something unique: a platform too important to bite the dust, even as it seems determined to do exactly that.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
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