Elon Musk seemed to suggest that his $44 billion purchase of X might not succeed. The person who owns the platform that used to be called Twitter mentioned on Saturday that X might not do well.
“The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now,” he said on X. “We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.”
A company named Meta introduced a competitor to X called Threads on July 5. It quickly got more than 100 million people to sign up, according to Time magazine. The information came from Sensor Tower.
However, six weeks later, the number of people using the platform every day has dropped a lot. It used to be 44 million right after Threads started, but now it’s only about 10 million. This information is from Similarweb.
Even though Musk is trying to remove fake accounts and make the platform a “super-app,” it doesn’t seem to be successful yet.
This week, Matt Binder from Mashable found out that around 42% of his followers on X might not be real because they have no followers of their own. This suggests they could be fake accounts.
Musk posted this after getting criticized for saying he will get rid of the feature that lets users block others on the platform. Activist Monica Lewinsky told him and CEO Linda Yaccarino that they should think again about this decision.
“hey @elonmusk + @lindayaX …please rethink removing the block feature. as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it’s a critical tool to keep people safe online. – that woman,” she wrote.
In May, a company called Fidelity lowered the value of its part of the company that used to be called Twitter. They said it was worth about $15 billion which is roughly only a third of what Musk paid for.