Happy anniversary to Elon Musk and Twitter. It was on 27 October 2022, after a six month will-they, won’t-they, that the deal was closed and Elon officially owned one of the world’s largest social media platforms.
This article from Slate takes a look at what has happened in the year since. The first, inescapable conclusion is that Twitter (now X) is smaller than it was one year ago. And not just because Elon fired a lot of the workforce. It has been reported that Twitter’s app has lost 13% of its daily active users.
At the same time, Twitter’s core users continue driving engagement on the platform. In October 2022, the top 10% of users accounted for 70% of all time spent on the app. A year on, and the top 10% now accounts for 72% of all time spent.
Critics of Elon will point to total users numbers and argue the billionaire broke Twitter. Supporters of Elon point to the massive reduction in headcount compared to a much smaller reduction in users and argue that the company is more efficient and profitable one year on. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Twitter continues to be a powerful platform to distribute information in real time around the world. When news breaks, most of the world’s journalists would first log onto Twitter. The only question that really matters is, will that statement continue to be true in three, five, ten years time?
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