How much money could Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) lose with the loss of advertisers?

X, or Twitter, has been lurching from crisis to crisis all year. Paid subscriptions, dwindling user numbers, and persistent antisemitism claims. The site has not just been a breeding ground for the far-right, but its owner has also been publishing anti-semitic statements on the platform.

Musk tweeted “[y]ou have said the actual truth” to a post that accused Jewish people of pushing the “exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The user’s post also claimed that Jews are supporting the immigration of “hordes of minorities” a reference to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

Musk has sinced apologised but it seems the damage has already been done with advertisers. Companies like Disney and Apple and at least 200 others have stopped their spending on the social media platform.

The financial damage that could come as a result of the boycott

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the company would lose $75m in revenue by the end of the year. If this were to be mirrored in 2024, X would lose close to $1 billion dollars by 2025.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company,” Musk said at a dealbook summit on Wednesday.

According to Reuters, X has lost ad revenue of at least 55% year-over-year each month since Musk took over. The billionaire, who has lost $40 billion of personal wealth this year, paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022. It is now estimated to be worth just under $15 billion, a two-thirds decrease.

“Basically everything is down on a year-over-year basis,” said David Carr, from the web analytics firm SimilarWeb.

Musk was bullish at said book launch criticising advertisers and telling them to “go fuck” themselves. For a platform that lives and dies on advertisement revenue, despite attempts to reform this with subscriptions, the killing of funding could prove the death knell for the site.