Twitter under Elon Musk

Based on Wikipedia: Twitter under Elon Musk

In October 2022, the world's richest man bought one of the world's most influential social networks—then proceeded to light it on fire. Not literally, of course. But what Elon Musk did to Twitter over the following years would prove nearly as dramatic, transforming a platform that had become synonymous with real-time public discourse into something almost unrecognizable.

The little blue bird that had nested in billions of pockets since 2006? Gone. Replaced by a stark, mathematical symbol: 𝕏.

The $44 Billion Impulse Buy

The acquisition itself reads like a soap opera written by financial analysts. In April 2022, Musk quietly accumulated a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, making him the company's largest shareholder. Then, on April 14th, he made an unsolicited offer to buy the entire company for $44 billion.

Twitter's board initially resisted. Then they accepted. Then Musk tried to back out, citing concerns about spam bot accounts—those automated fake users that inflate engagement numbers. Twitter sued him. A trial was scheduled for October.

And then, in a twist that surprised everyone, Musk reversed course again and completed the purchase on October 28, 2022.

His first acts as owner were swift and brutal. He fired CEO Parag Agrawal and several other top executives. He took the company private, merging it into a new entity called X Corp. The message was clear: this was a hostile takeover in spirit, even if the paperwork said otherwise.

The Chainsaw Approach to Management

What happened next became a case study in corporate disruption—or destruction, depending on your perspective.

On November 4, 2022, roughly half of Twitter's workforce was laid off in a single night. The New York Times described the process as "haphazard." Offices worldwide shuttered for the weekend. The company's internal directory, cheerfully named "Birdhouse," went dark.

But the layoffs were just the beginning.

Days later, Twitter asked some of those fired employees to come back—apparently, someone had realized they actually needed those people. Then they fired most of the contractors. Then they fired employees who criticized Musk publicly. Or internally. Or, it seemed, at all.

On November 16th, Musk sent an email that would become infamous: commit to "extremely hardcore" work to build "Twitter 2.0," or leave the company with severance. The deadline was the next day.

Hundreds of employees walked out.

Business Insider reported that fewer than 2,000 employees remained at a company that had once employed around 8,000. By April 2023, Musk told the BBC the headcount had dropped below 1,500. The communications team was gutted so thoroughly that when NPR sent a press inquiry in April 2023, they received a single emoji in response: a pile of feces.

The Rebrand Nobody Asked For

On July 23, 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would become X.

The transformation happened with disorienting speed. The X.com domain—which Musk had held onto since his PayPal days in the late 1990s—began redirecting to Twitter. The iconic bird logo disappeared, replaced by a character from mathematical typography: the "blackboard bold" X, which has appeared in textbooks since the 1970s and exists in Unicode as a dedicated symbol.

The handle @x, which had been registered since 2007 by a photographer named Gene X Hwang, was simply taken. Hwang had expressed willingness to negotiate a sale, but instead received an email informing him the company was claiming it. No compensation was offered.

By July 31st, the transformation was complete across major app stores. "Tweets" became "posts." The blue color scheme that had defined Twitter for nearly two decades was eventually stripped away entirely in a December 2024 redesign.

The rebrand baffled marketing experts. Twitter was one of the most recognized brands on Earth. The word "tweet" had entered dictionaries. People didn't say "I'll X you later"—they said "I'll tweet you." The Associated Press quickly issued guidance that journalists should refer to the platform as "X, formerly known as Twitter," acknowledging the awkward reality that nobody was actually going to call it X.

By September 2023, polling confirmed what everyone already knew: most users still called it Twitter.

The Vision: An Everything App

Why destroy a perfectly good brand? Musk had a vision—one inspired by WeChat, the Chinese super-app that handles messaging, payments, food delivery, ride-hailing, bill payments, and essentially every other digital transaction imaginable for over a billion users.

Musk wanted X to become the Western equivalent: a "digital town square" that was also a bank, a shopping mall, a job board, and an entertainment hub all in one.

To that end, X did add new features. Long-form text posts allowed users to write essays directly on the platform. Audio and video calling were integrated. A job search feature called X Hiring appeared. And most notably, xAI's chatbot Grok was embedded throughout the platform, offering artificial intelligence assistance to paying subscribers.

The verification system—those little blue checkmarks that once indicated a user was who they claimed to be—was transformed into a subscription product. Now anyone could buy a checkmark for $3 to $32 per month, depending on their tier. The original verification system, which Twitter had used to confirm the identities of journalists, celebrities, and public figures, was effectively abolished.

The Content Moderation Crisis

As staff disappeared and features proliferated, something else grew: chaos.

Under Musk's ownership, X has struggled persistently with viral misinformation, hate speech—particularly antisemitism—and child sexual abuse material. The Australian e-Safety Commission fined the company over $400,000 for failing to properly disclose how it polices child abuse content. The platform's trust and safety chief resigned in June 2023, reportedly hours after Musk personally overruled a moderation decision.

Musk positioned himself as a free speech absolutist, but the implementation proved inconsistent. Ten journalists were suspended from the platform in late 2022. Media outlets were labeled as "state-affiliated" and had their visibility restricted. The "Twitter Files"—internal documents Musk released to selected journalists—were presented as evidence of previous censorship, though critics argued the releases were selective and misleading.

When nonprofit organizations Media Matters and the Center for Countering Digital Hate published reports critical of X's content moderation, the company sued them rather than addressing the underlying concerns.

Musk as Commentator-in-Chief

Perhaps the most striking change was Musk's own presence on the platform. The billionaire transformed from a prolific tweeter into something like a shadow content moderator and political commentator, using his ownership position to amplify certain viewpoints while suppressing others.

During the 2024 riots in the United Kingdom—sparked by misinformation about a stabbing attack—Musk weighed in directly. He criticized Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He posted "Civil war is inevitable" in response to a tweet about mass migration. He promoted a conspiracy theory about the UK government planning to build detention camps in the Falkland Islands.

He restored the account of Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist who had been banned for violating Twitter's rules, and then interacted with him publicly on the platform.

The UK's Secretary of State for Science and Technology made a telling observation: dealing with large tech companies and their leaders, he said, was becoming "more like negotiating with foreign states than normal businesses."

In 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported an incident that captured the strange new reality of X: Musk had allegedly used the platform to solicit a social media influencer he had never met to have his child. When they declined, he unfollowed them—and their impressions and revenue reportedly dropped sharply afterward.

The Money Problem

For all the chaos, there was a straightforward business question at the heart of the Twitter acquisition: could Musk make it work financially?

The early signs were not encouraging. Musk himself acknowledged the company was losing over $4 million per day when he initiated the layoffs. Advertisers—historically the lifeblood of social media platforms—fled in droves, spooked by the content moderation concerns and Musk's unpredictable behavior.

One year after the acquisition, internal company documents revealed X had estimated its own value at about $19 billion—down 55 percent from what Musk paid. By October 2024, investment firm Fidelity, which had put money into the deal, estimated the company's value had fallen 79 percent from the purchase price.

That's a staggering destruction of value: from $44 billion to roughly $9 billion in two years.

The Department of Justice fined X $350,000 for missing deadlines to comply with a search warrant for Donald Trump's account. The Supreme Court declined to hear X's appeal. Australia imposed its own fine for the child safety disclosure failures. More penalties appeared to be on the horizon.

Yet in early 2025, reports emerged that Musk was seeking a new round of financing at—somehow—a $44 billion valuation, right back where he started. Whether this represented genuine investor interest or creative financial engineering remained unclear.

The Ownership Shell Game

Musk was never the sole owner of X Corp., though he was certainly its controlling force. The company was owned by X Holdings Corp., which in turn had investors including entities linked to billionaires Bill Ackman, Larry Ellison, and Marc Andreessen, as well as more than twenty Fidelity-associated funds.

Then, on March 28, 2025, X Corp. was acquired by xAI—Musk's artificial intelligence company. The move essentially consolidated two Musk ventures under one roof, though the exact financial and strategic implications remained opaque.

It was a fitting development for a platform that had become, above all else, an extension of one man's vision and personality.

The CEO Carousel

Musk initially served as CEO himself, but the arrangement was always presented as temporary. In December 2022, facing backlash over various controversies, he posted a poll asking whether he should step down. Over 17 million users voted, with 57.5 percent saying yes.

Musk's response to losing his own poll was revealing. He mused about unfounded theories that bots had influenced the result. He suggested future policy polls should be restricted to paying subscribers only. Eventually, he announced he would step down once a replacement was found—though he would continue running the technical teams.

When asked by the BBC in April 2023 about the CEO situation, Musk replied that he had appointed his dog to the position. It was the kind of joke that doubled as a statement about how seriously he took corporate governance.

The actual replacement came in May 2023: Linda Yaccarino, a media executive who had run advertising sales for NBCUniversal. The hire was interpreted as an attempt to repair relationships with advertisers who had fled the platform.

Yaccarino lasted just over two years. She resigned on July 9, 2025, leaving the platform's leadership structure once again uncertain.

What X Is Now

So what, exactly, is X in its current form?

The basic mechanics remain familiar. Users post short messages that are public by default. They can follow other users, repost content to their own feeds, quote posts with commentary, and "like" individual items. Hashtags organize content by topic. The @ symbol tags other users. You can mute, block, or remove followers as needed.

But layered on top of this Twitter-like foundation are the additions Musk has championed: subscription tiers (Basic, Premium, Premium+) that gate access to features including the AI chatbot Grok. A "Verified Organization" tier for businesses and governments. The job search function. Audio and video calls. Long-form posting.

Some legacy Twitter features disappeared entirely: Circles (a way to share with limited groups), NFT profile pictures, and the experimental option to display pronouns in profiles.

The platform now generates AI-powered "Stories" that summarize trending topics—a feature that would have seemed like science fiction when Twitter launched in 2006, and now feels almost mundane in the age of large language models.

The Meaning of It All

Three years after Musk's acquisition, X remains one of the most significant communication platforms on Earth—and also one of the most contested.

Musk's defenders argue he has liberated the platform from biased content moderation, expanded its feature set, and charted a course toward an ambitious everything-app future. His critics see a cautionary tale: a billionaire using a globally influential platform as a personal megaphone while the underlying business deteriorates and harmful content proliferates.

Perhaps the most honest assessment is that X has become a reflection of its owner in ways that Twitter never was. The platform's unpredictability, its ideological commitments, its disdain for conventional corporate communication, its willingness to pick fights with governments and institutions—all of this mirrors Musk himself.

Whether that transformation serves users, advertisers, or democracy remains the open question at the heart of the X experiment. The bird is dead. The mathematical symbol has taken its place. And the digital town square has never been more chaotic—or more watched.