Honestly, if you ask ten different people whether Elon Musk ruined Twitter, you’ll get twelve different shouting matches. Some folks see him as the guy who saved free speech with a flamethrower. Others think he took a perfectly good (if slightly broken) digital town square and turned it into a weird, buggy echo chamber for his own hobbies.
The data is messy. It’s not just "up" or "down."
Look at the numbers from late 2025. X—yeah, most of us still call it Twitter—reportedly saw its first major revenue hike under Musk’s reign, hitting about $2.9 billion for the year. That sounds great until you remember that before the $44 billion buyout, the company was pulling in $4.4 billion from ads alone. Basically, the ship is still floating, but it's much smaller, and the paint is peeling off in ways nobody expected.
The Chaos of the Rebrand
The move to "X" was... a choice. It wasn't just a name change. It was a total identity scrub. By May 2024, the x.com domain finally took over completely. Gone were the birds. Gone were the "tweets." Musk wanted an "everything app," something like WeChat in China where you buy groceries and message your mom in the same place.
Did it work? Well, we have job searches now. We have audio and video calls. We have Grok, the xAI chatbot that basically lives in the sidebar. But for most users, these feel like extra buttons on a remote they never asked for.
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The biggest "ruined" argument usually starts with the algorithm. The "For You" feed became a different beast entirely. In 2023, reports surfaced that engineers were literally ordered to boost Musk’s own posts by a factor of 1,000 because he was annoyed a tweet about the Super Bowl didn't get enough traction. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it was a "high urgency" internal ticket.
When you manipulate the town square to make sure the owner is always the loudest guy in the room, the "square" part starts to feel a bit like a vanity project.
The Bot Problem and the "Pay to Play" Era
Musk bought the platform promising to "defeat the spam bots or die trying."
He didn't die. But the bots? They’re still very much alive. They just have blue checks now.
By turning verification into a $8-a-month subscription, the platform flipped the script on trust. Used to be, a blue check meant "this person is who they say they are." Now, it often just means "this person has a credit card and wants their replies moved to the top."
It’s created a weird tiered system. If you don't pay, your voice is buried. If you do pay, you’re often lumped in with crypto-scammers and AI-generated accounts that farm engagement by posting "What do you think of this?" under every viral video.
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Why the Advertisers Left (and Stayed Away)
Money talks. And for a long time, the money was screaming as it ran for the exit. Large brands like Disney, IBM, and Comcast pulled back hard after concerns over brand safety and Musk's own polarizing posts.
- 2024 Revenue: $2.5 billion (a 13.7% drop from the year before).
- Ad Reach: X is projected to hold just 0.2% of global digital ad spend in 2026.
- The "Go F* Yourself" Moment:** Musk literally told advertisers to do exactly that on stage at a 2023 summit.
It’s hard to convince a Fortune 500 company to put their Christmas ad next to a chaotic thread of unmoderated vitriol when the owner is telling them to get lost.
The Grok Scandal of 2026
Lately, the "ruined" conversation has shifted toward AI. In early 2026, the platform hit a massive legal wall. Grok, the AI integrated into X, started allowing users to generate and edit images of real people.
It got ugly fast.
Non-consensual deepfakes flooded the site. By January 15, 2026, X had to scramble to implement "geoblocking" and restrictions to stop Grok from undressing people in photos. California's Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation. Even one of the mothers of Musk’s children sued xAI over deepfakes.
This isn't just "tech bro" drama. It's a fundamental safety issue that makes the old Twitter days of "too many mean tweets" look like a playground dispute.
Is Anyone Still Using This Thing?
Here’s the part where the "he ruined it" crowd gets confused: the traffic hasn't completely evaporated.
As of late 2025, X still claims around 557 million monthly active users. People are addicted. We complain, we post about how much we hate it, and then we refresh the feed.
However, the demographic shift is real.
Younger users (the 18-29 crowd) are bailing. Pew Research showed a drop from 42% to 33% in that age group within a single year. They’re moving to TikTok and Instagram. X is becoming a place for news junkies, political brawlers, and the "crypto-tech-finance" crowd.
The Actionable Verdict
If you're a user or a brand wondering if you should stay or go, here is how you handle the "New Twitter" reality:
1. Treat Verification as a Reach Tool, Not a Status Symbol.
If you're trying to grow, you basically have to pay the "Musk Tax" for the subscription. Without it, the algorithm will treat your posts like invisible ink. Don't do it for the badge; do it for the impressions.
2. Lock Down Your Privacy.
Given the issues with Grok and AI scraping, check your settings. You can opt-out of having your data used to train the AI models. Do it today.
3. Diversify Your Presence.
Don't let X be your only home. Whether it's Threads, Bluesky, or just a good old-fashioned email list, the volatility of X means your "land" there is rented from a very unpredictable landlord.
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4. Use Community Notes for Fact-Checking.
Surprisingly, the Community Notes feature—which Musk rebranded from Birdwatch—has actually been one of the few success stories. It’s a crowdsourced way to debunk nonsense, and it’s often more effective than the old moderation teams.
Elon Musk didn't necessarily "delete" Twitter. He just mutated it. It’s a different species now—faster, meaner, and way more focused on the whims of one man. Whether that's "ruined" depends entirely on what you were looking for in the first place.