Elon Musk Is Rich Enough to Fund Its Losses: X Doesn’t Need Advertisers

►Subscribe to Mediaite: https://bit.ly/3MjuECB When Elon Musk drastically overpaid to buy Twitter for $44 billion last year, advertising made up nearly 90 percent of its revenue. That would prove to be a problem for the erratic billionaire who once declared, on Twitter, “I hate advertising.” As 2023 comes to a close, Twitter is in dire financial straits. Its value has plummeted as Musk made drastic changes to its aesthetic and function, sparked outrage by welcoming back toxic users, scared off blue-chip advertisers with controversial decisions and behavior, and renamed the platform X. Welcome to Mediaite, THE site for news and opinion on the intersection of media and politics. Join Mediaite+ https://www.mediaite.com/subscribe/ ► Website: https://www.mediaite.com/ ► Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mediaite/ ► X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/mediaite ► Threads: https://www.threads.net/@mediaite ► Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mediaite The chaos has prompted many on X and elsewhere to gloat that Musk is running the platform into the ground. Musk himself even warned the company is facing collapse. In his wild DealBook interview with Aaron Ross Sorkin, Musk said the advertiser troubles are “going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.” But is X actually facing an imminent collapse? I called up Andy Wu, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and put the question to him. He said all the doomsaying belies the fact that Musk is rich enough to fund X’s losses for as long as he wants to. “He personally can afford to sustain [X] in perpetuity if he chooses,” Wu said. Twitter has never been a money-maker. The company posted a loss for eight out of the last ten years. “It’s important to keep in mind that Twitter was an extremely troubled company before Musk took over,” Wu said, with annual losses often in the hundreds of millions of dollars. #elonmusk #twitter #x