Twitter

$1.8B in 2025 X ad revenue, versus Twitter’s $4B in 2021, frames coverage of the Musk-era platform as a diminished but politically consequential successor.

Who they are

Twitter is the social platform now operating as X in the coverage, chiefly appearing as the company Elon Musk acquired in 2022 and later folded into a broader Musk-controlled corporate structure. Its stories span the takeover’s legal and governance fallout, advertising, moderation, and competition with Meta’s Threads.

The recent arc

Coverage reached its all-time high in 2022Q4, after Musk completed the acquisition and fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and policy head Vijaya Gadde. That peak followed the disputed deal process, including Musk’s attempt to terminate the merger and Twitter’s agreement to a roughly $44B all-cash acquisition; the company then became a recurring case study in owner-driven platform change rather than a conventional public-company story.

Recent coverage is lower-volume and focused on the consequences of that transition. A May 2026 SpaceX filing put X ad revenue at $1.8B in 2025, below both $1.7B in 2024 and Twitter’s $4B in 2021, while reporting 6.3M active paid X and Grok subscribers. Other recent stories cover Musk’s SEC settlement over his Twitter stake disclosures, his petition to end the FTC’s 2022 data-use order after X’s reported mergers with xAI and SpaceX, and evidence from Pew that US executive-agency engagement on X rose during Trump’s second term. Meanwhile, Meta said Threads reached 500M monthly active users in June 2026.

The tension

The coverage circles a clash between X’s reach and its commercial and governance constraints. Musk’s free-speech-maximalist approach and reported deprioritization of external links have intensified scrutiny of moderation and platform health, while the revenue figures suggest a harder advertising business than Twitter once had. Meta is the clearest competitive foil: Twitter threatened to sue Meta over Threads in 2023, and Threads’ subsequent growth makes the rivalry more consequential.

Why it matters

If the present trajectory holds, the Twitter-to-X story will matter less as a standalone social-network rebrand than as a test of whether a politically salient communications platform can sustain its business and regulatory obligations while being integrated with Musk’s other companies. The available coverage supports continued influence in government and public discourse, but does not establish that subscriptions, Grok integration, or corporate consolidation will offset the gap from Twitter-era advertising.

Related: Elon Musk · Facebook · Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads, saying Meta “engaged in sy · Elon Musk takes over Twitter and fires several top executives, includi · Twitter agrees to be acquired “by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk”