Twitter was failing when Elon Musk purchased the social media platform in October 2022. He radically changed it — deliberately renaming it X to distinguish the platform as something far broader. He sought to make X fair by helping independent journalists and creators make money from the platform by sharing advertising revenues. But pressure from progressives made advertisers flee, so Musk filed a lawsuit to bring them back.
Progressives had convinced advertisers that Musk’s elimination of Twitter’s biased censorship of conservatives — including allowing figures like President Donald Trump back on the platform — would allow disinformation, hate speech, and offensive content. The boycott resulted in a reported 55-60% drop in U.S. ad revenue from 2022 to 2023.
However, hypocritically, Musk’s alignment with Trump after the 2024 election boosted investor confidence and encouraged some advertisers to reconsider X, with a projected 25% increase in ad spending from agencies in February. Since Musk took the company private, figures are mostly estimates or what he reveals.
X cultivated new advertisers, with 46 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers in January new to the platform since 2022, including brands like Temu, NFL, DraftKings, Amazon, and Dell.
Musk sharply denounced the advertiser exodus, famously telling advertisers to “go f**k yourself” at a 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit and accusing them of blackmail. His rhetoric escalated when he filed a lawsuit, declaring “now it is war” against advertisers.
X’s revenue is recovering — 16.5% ad growth in 2025 — but is roughly half of Twitter’s 2021 peak. X is estimated to have as many as 611 million monthly active users globally, according to sources like DemandSage, up from 368 million in 2022. Subscriptions, such as X Premium, are expected to contribute 10-15% of revenue this year.
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Twitter’s revenue in 2021 was approximately $5.08 billion, primarily from advertising (89%), with the rest from data licensing and other sources. Twitter carried a significant debt load of about $5.5 billion as of mid-2022. In 2021, it reported a net loss of $221 million. Growth was stagnant during the last few years of Twitter.
Musk took out $13 billion in loans when he acquired the platform, which likely increased the debt. Its net loss in 2025 may be comparable to 2021, with estimates as low as $220 million.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee suspected illegal collusion to boycott X coordinated by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which was formed by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and conducted an investigation in July 2024 titled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.” The committee released an interim staff report titled “GARM’s Harm: How the World’s Biggest Brands Seek to Control Online Speech” on July 10, 2024.
GARM was formed by WFA in 2019 as a flagship project of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Its stated goal was to create a “common understanding” in the advertising industry of “what harmful and sensitive content is” as well as “where ads should not appear.” The WEF is an unelected, elitist group of wealthy corporate and political leaders attempting to shape global policies without governmental accountability.
The congressional report stated, “GARM’s internal documents show that GARM was asked by a member to ‘arrange a meeting and hear more about [GARM’s] perspectives about the Twitter situation and a possible boycott from many companies.” After its effort, GARM “bragged about” the fact that Twitter was “80% below revenue forecasts.” GARM’s leader and co-founder, Rob Rakowitz, once complained in an email that the Constitution was written “by white men exclusively.”
The report alleged that GARM likely violated federal antitrust laws by limiting consumer choice through coordinated demonetization, describing collusion as “the supreme evil of antitrust.” The report also found that GARM pressured Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast, due to his position that healthy people don’t need the COVID-19 vaccine.
A month later, X filed an antitrust lawsuit in Texas against WFA and GARM, along with companies including Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Ørsted. The lawsuit claimed these entities engaged in a “systematic illegal boycott,” conspiring to withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from X after Musk’s takeover, violating U.S. antitrust laws by coordinating a boycott due to concerns over loosened content moderation and brand safety. Internal GARM documents revealed discussions about enforcing brand safety standards — a broad, vague phrase used to justify suppressing conservative speech — which X said were used to justify the boycott.
The lawsuit and congressional investigation led to the dissolution of GARM in August 2024, with the group citing resource strain from the litigation as the reason for shutting down. Then-X CEO Linda Yaccarino said this was evidence of GARM’s wrongdoing.
In February 2025, X broadened the lawsuit to include additional major brands such as Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest, and Shell International, alleging they participated in the boycott orchestrated by GARM.
The defendant companies filed a motion to dismiss in May, claiming they didn’t coordinate to halt the advertising.
Some companies, like Unilever, were dropped from the lawsuit after signing new ad deals, and others, such as Verizon, committed to significant ad spending ($10 million) after receiving litigation warnings.
Despite MSM hype that users fled X since Musk took over to find refuge with far-left Bluesky, Bluesky is failing. Bluesky officially launched in 2023, and by early 2025 had only a miserly 30 million users by the most favorable estimates. Only 2.7 million reportedly left X after Musk took over, and Bluesky gained about 2.5 million in that time.
Unlike X, which Musk has cultivated to treat both the right and left fairly, something no other major social media platform does — the rest all cater to the left exclusively and censor the right — Bluesky is a bastion of leftist hate. Even leftist billionaire Mark Cuban said the platform is full of “agree with me or you are a nazi fascist” and users have "grown ruder and more hateful.”
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