Twitter/X Is Doomed

No matter what financial trickery Musk tries to pull.

Twitter/X Is Doomed

No matter what financial trickery Musk tries to pull.

Remember when Twitter was for outing Hollywood perverts, calling out systemic racism, sharing stupid memes, and seeing which awful opinions your favourite celebrity held? Those were better days. But sadly, they now reside deep in our melancholy nostalgia box, next to memories of Bebo, MySpace, and the audiovisual bliss of a PS2 loading screen. Elon Musk, driven by his inexplicably inflated ego, has terraformed this once-fertile digital plane into a barren fascist hellhole. Ever since his self-inflicted, overpriced purchase and subsequent butchering of the company, Twitter has been on its last legs. Its once ubiquitous brand and reputation are now totally destroyed. Its once meagre cash flow is now non-existent. By all rights, it should have died a long time ago. However, it seems Musk may have somehow saved this corrupted giant, as its value has suddenly shot back up to match what he originally paid for it. Unfortunately, things are not what they seem, and Twitter is still destined for the grave. But, to explain why, we need to rewind the clocks.

October 2022

Elon Musk, forced by lawyers to follow through on his public offer, buys the entirety of Twitter for $44 billion. Musk doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around, so he obtains $13 billion in bank loans, $6.5 billion in personal loans collateralised against Tesla stock, $20 billion from selling Tesla stock, and $7.1 billion in private investment. Now laden with debt, Twitter begins to bleed cash. To resolve this, Musk slashes the workforce in half and comes up with the clever idea to charge users who want to retain their blue verification check mark. Frustratingly for Musk’s wallet, an advertiser boycott is quickly sparked when Musk decides to restore and support neo-Nazi groups on the platform, and to this day, Twitter has less than half the advertisers it once had, causing the platform to haemorrhage cash even harder.

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January 2025

One of Twitter/X’s own private investors publicly values the company at only $9.4 billion, a nearly 80% loss since the original purchase. Because Twitter/X has over $12 billion in debt and Musk holds $6.5 billion in personal debt for Twitter/X, this puts the company at over $9 billion in negative equity.

In the same month, an internal email from Musk to several Twitter/X employees admits, “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even.” Knowing how Musk likes to massage the truth and bend financial reports, this is essentially an admission that the company can’t go on much longer, and now, thanks to this leak, everyone knows.

Soon after this, the Wall Street Journal reports that banks are looking to sell on Musk’s Twitter debt. This is what banks do to protect themselves if they expect their debtors to go bankrupt. Likewise, the lenders who collateralised their loans against Tesla stock are rumoured to be considering a margin call, given that with Tesla’s sharp drop in value in February and Twitter/X’s incoming oblivion, they would need to recall their loans to have hope in hell of ever seeing that money again.

This should have been it. The final nail in the coffin. The lenders are jumping ship and pulling the copper wire out of the walls, all while the cash runs dry. This was heralding Twitter/X’s demise.

19th March 2025

In a shock move, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, 8VC, Goanna Capital, and Fidelity buy $1 billion worth of Twitter/X stock from Musk at a massively inflated price, effectively valuing the company at Musk’s original purchase price of $44 billion. Yet, nothing has changed — Twitter/X is still losing money hand over fist, user numbers are declining, and advertisers are still actively boycotting the company.

Was this a brilliant 5D chess move by Musk? No. It’s tantamount to fraud.