Financial woes at social media platform X have become acute on the back of an advertiser boycott, Fortune reports.
Elon Musk’s social media platform has attracted significant criticism in recent weeks for the role it played in the UK riots, with misinformation being spread freely in the wake of the Southport attacks and far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson being given complete freedom.
Advertisers have been abandoning the platform in spades as a consequence, with Alex Wilson, a senior strategist at London agency Pitch, telling City A.M. that its unregulated nature has made it hard to convince clients to part way with money on the site.
“The verification system is a mess, half your followers are now sexbots, the most interesting people have moved somewhere else, the people still there are posting less, and your timeline is just and endless stream of misery”, he said.
“How do you make the case for advertising on a platform like that?”
ALSO READ: Elon Musk tells advertisers to ‘go f**k themselves’
The financial headaches are now starting to catch up with Musk, with questions raised over how long the company can survive as it continues to bleed money.
According to Fortune reports, the last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had Twitter revenue at $661 million.
But after you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84 per cent, in today’s dollars.
It may mean that Musk is forced to sell off Tesla stock, with one asset manager expert saying he expects anything in the region of $1 and $2 billion in stock to be sold off, which could cause shares to lose between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of their value.
Sympathy will likely be in short supply due to Musk’s reckless handling of the social media platform since he took over.
As one person put it, “when you tell your customers to go f—k themselves, then sue them when they stop advertising on your platform, it’s hard to be sympathetic.”
Related: Musk’s image generation tool ‘unleashing torrent of misinformation’