X: Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition one year later

Friday, October 27 marks the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk's decision to buy X.com (formerly Twitter) for $44 billion. The company has seen staggering changes under Musk including changing the company's name, adding pay tiers for verification and general use, bringing controversial figures who were once banned back to the platform, and eliminating 80% of its workforce.

According to Sensor Tower, downloads are down 38% since the company was acquired by Musk and 46 out of the top 100 advertisers on the platform have fallen off. Yahoo Finance Technology Editor Dan Howley breaks down the timeline of events since Musk took over and how the company has fared since making those changes.

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Video Transcript

JOSH LIPTON: Friday marks one year of Elon Musk's ownership of X, formerly known as Twitter. And Dan Howley is here with a look back at this rocky ride. Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: That's right. Elon Musk is-- my cat's also in the shot. I'm just going to move--

JULIE HYMAN: Speaking of rocky rides.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. Go ahead, Oscar. He's not a big X user anymore. He dropped off along with a lot of other people when Elon Musk took over. And we have some data from Sensor Tower that they shared with Yahoo Finance. According to them, post-acquisition, downloads of X are down nearly 38% compared to October 2022. So that was when the company was acquired. And you're obviously seeing this kind of falloff impact a lot of things, whether that's advertising dollars, which seemingly are continue to fall below where they originally were.

There's also the idea that US mobile app downloads are off, down 57% in September 2023. That's compared to when the company was acquired. So we also have just to give you more of this data that Sensor Towers offering, 46 out of the top 100 advertisers on X have completely ceased ad spending on the platform. Again, this is according to two Sensor Towers.

So in addition to that, what is Elon Musk done? Well, he's cut huge amounts of employees. There were some technical issues with the company. He changed the name obviously to X, which sure, OK. And then he's also added different tiers. So he's going to have-- there's the premium plan that you have right now for $8. And there's talk about how they'll be a premium plan with half ads than a premium plan with ads. There's also the idea that you might be charging $1 per user to try to get rid of bots.

He let people back on that were previously banned for posting inappropriate content on the site. And so this is kind of just been the ups and Downs of the platform. Look, Twitter's never been a place where people say, you know, I love Twitter. For as long as I've been on it, people have been saying they hate it. It just seems that it's becoming more and more of that kind of feeling. And we're starting to see the impact of this year that Elon Musk has had with the company.

JOSH LIPTON: Dan Howley, thank you, as always, for the insight.