It’s hard to know exactly how dire the financial situation is at Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). However, insider sources recently revealed to Bloomberg that the social media platform expects to end 2023 with “roughly” $2.5 billion in advertising revenue.
That’s “a significant slump from prior years,” sources said. It’s also about half a billion short of the $3 billion that X executives expected to make in ad sales in 2023, one source said.
Last year, Twitter raked in more than $1 billion in ad revenue per quarter, sources said. But in each of the first three quarters of 2023, X only managed to generate “a little more than $600 million” in ad revenue. Now, the most recent advertiser fallout over antisemitic content on X—estimated in November as triggering a sudden $75 million loss—is still casting a shadow on what could become an even more dismal fourth quarter.
Sources told Bloomberg that advertising earnings comprise 70–75 percent of X’s revenue. This suggests that X’s total earnings in 2023 will be “roughly $3.4 billion,” boosted by subscriptions and data licensing deals, Bloomberg reported.
Joe Benarroch, head of X business operations, told Bloomberg that its report “presents an incomplete view of our entire business, as the sources you’re relying on for information are not providing accurate and comprehensive details.”
Benarroch also made it clear that X is no longer interested in being compared to Twitter. According to Bloomberg, Benarroch said that X is an “evolving NEW global business with multiple revenue streams. We are not Twitter any longer and not measuring ourselves by old Twitter metrics—both in revenue and user metrics.”
X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.
Musk beefing with Disney on X
After Musk boosted an antisemitic post on X, he apologized, but he never removed his controversial post and continued antagonizing advertisers that he claimed were “going to kill the company.”
Among the major brands pausing advertising on X is Disney, which seems to have particularly offended Musk. He’s spent the past week targeting Disney CEO Bob Iger in a series of X posts, calling out Disney for boycotting X. Musk appears particularly frustrated that Disney is advertising on Meta platforms after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram are “prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex.”
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