This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 14th, 2026.
The social network X has changed its name, its owner, and its line in the accounts. While it has kept its standing with those in power, new figures show that revenue has sunk like a stone. But owner Elon Musk has a new plan.
It has been hard to know how things are actually going for X — formerly Twitter. Now a door has opened.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 he took the company off the stock market and transparency shrank. Since then the service has changed its name and moved between several of Musk’s companies, ending up at his now-listed space venture SpaceX. And suddenly it is possible to see what is happening behind the scenes.
The figures don’t just show how the social network is doing. They also give a clue as to what Musk intends to use it for.
Under Musk’s direction the platform has become a more radical service. The tone is harsher and almost no posts are taken down any more. The end of censorship, some say. Others feel the radicalization has made the service unpleasant, and have chosen to delete their accounts.
That a major change has taken place is also plain in the numbers.
During an on-stage interview in 2023, Elon Musk said he did not intend to yield to “financial blackmail” from advertisers who were unhappy with how the platform’s content was developing. Those boycotting X could “go to hell,” Musk said during the interview.
Many advertisers appear to have done exactly that.
In 2022, X (then Twitter) had around one billion dollars in revenue during the year’s second quarter. Set against the same period this year, the corresponding figure is 367 million dollars. A decline of 66 percent in four years. Looking at the whole first half of the year, the drop is essentially as large.
Two-thirds of all advertising revenue has therefore disappeared from X. A normal company probably would not survive that. But as we know, nothing is normal in Elon Musk’s world.
SpaceX does not report the social network separately in its accounts, but there is a line for advertising revenue that amounts to much the same thing. Everything is listed in the category “AI revenue,” which is optimistic to say the least.
Classifying ads in the X feed as “AI” says less about what the service is today — and more about what Musk wants it to become in the future.
In the space company’s prospectus ahead of the listing, X is described as a “free speech platform.” Selling ads is admittedly mentioned a couple of times, but the social network seems to serve a more important purpose than that. X is to become a data source for — and a distributor of — AI services. It is simply a way to acquire users for them. In the same way that Meta uses Facebook to get users for Meta’s AI services, and Google likewise with its respective operations.
It is worth noting, however, that the market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI have no equivalent services to draw on for winning new customers — and they are by far the largest anyway. Hitching a ride on other popular services is not an obvious method.
One can also wonder how the content on X affects potential AI customers.
As a private individual it can be entertaining to read about marmots on OnlyFans, or Italian bank loans to farmers secured against parmesan cheese. In between, less pleasant things such as the occasional Nazi. A generous description would be “eclectic.” But it is easy to understand why many no longer want to take part.
That is precisely why the step of associating your company with a platform carrying this material is not so obvious. It can even become counterproductive. Advertisers have already fled, because they do not want to appear in that content environment.
And it is exactly those businesses that Musk and SpaceX need to reach with their AI services. So far, few private individuals pay for AI. The purchase of the coding service Cursor is one example of a bet on specialized offerings that companies might conceivably pay for. The new service Grokbot, launched this week, is described as a “colleague” — an AI that works on your company’s behalf.
X works well for raising awareness of these new products — but that is not enough. It has to turn into paying customers for the logic to hold together.
Much therefore suggests that X’s many acquisitions and relocations within Musk’s corporate portfolio were about finance more than strategy. Musk was the named buyer — but he brought a great deal of other people’s debt with him to complete the deal.
Those loans have now been settled, and converted into shares in entirely different companies. That is an achievement in itself. Billion-dollar borrowing taken on to buy an overvalued company like Twitter has now evaporated. And compared with that, X’s advertising revenue is a very small problem to solve.
What was once one of the world’s most important social networks has become a subordinate clause in Musk’s enormous corporate construction. It is simply not particularly important any more — neither to him nor to the space company at large.
Musk has his sights on bigger challenges these days. We are talking about a company whose goal is to build human colonies on Mars. He has his hands full there.
