Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.
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.
Elon sounds like he’s experienced, skilled and is approaching things from a theoretical or ethical or other grand point of view. He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010’s. I wasn’t a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.
Then he went and bought Twitter. As a software engineer all my life, and in the startup scene, and having worked in a failed social media platform, I have some experience. Everything he’s said about Twitter is crap and everything he’s done is stupid. And the results speak for themselves.
I’ve seen people say that Elon sounds great about things they don’t know too much about. But when the topic comes to things they do understand, Elon clearly is wrong.
He started his career with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he bet it all on a couple of businesses be bought (he was never a founder, always a purchaser).
Basically he’s been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.
From what I’ve heard about his time at Paypal he really lucked out by basically being pushed out of the company with a golden parachute to ride out on.
Elon Musk didn’t build the company.
Elon Musk invested into the company, and then sued Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning into giving him “Founder” status. When Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning left the company, it all started to go to shit. Sure there’s some momentum, but by 2015+, its clear that Elon Musk’s buffoonery has taken over (ex: using Tesla money to buy his cousin’s company SolarCity) and today we have 100% Elon bullshit like Cybertruck.
That’s what I said a couple of paragraphs later