X / Twitter's user base has stopped growing under Elon Musk | Mashable.

X / Twitter's user base has stopped growing under Elon Musk

X's user base has remained stagnant since Musk acquired the social media company.

By Matthews Martins on July 9, 2024

Elon Musk's X is struggling to grow its global daily active user base. Credit: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Elon Musk's X is stuck.

X, formerly known as Twitter, has stagnated when it comes to user growth ever since Musk acquired the company. According to a new report from the Financial Times, X has around 251 global daily active users as of the second quarter of 2024.

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This represents just a 1.6 percent increase in users on X compared to the same period last year.

The social media platform, then-known as Twitter, enjoyed double-digit growth, adding tens of millions of new users year-after-year before Musk took over the company in October 2022.

In contrast, Musk's X only added a little over four million users from from Q2 2023 to Q2 2024.

Stalled growth at Musk's X worse than it looks

The quarterly breakdown of X's meager daily active user growth actually puts a positive spin on the platform's realities, according to Mashable's own previous reporting.

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X hasn't openly shared its daily active user numbers since Musk took the company private. However, shortly after Musk acquired the company, then-Twitter's new owner was quite open about the bump in X's user base – seemingly buoyed by users signing up to see what he was going to do.

In late November 2022, Musk shared a graph showing that then-Twitter added roughly five million daily active users in the month since he acquired the company. The weekly breakdown graph displayed that the social media platform had 254.5 million daily active users as of Oct. 23, the last full week of Twitter before Musk took over. By Nov. 20, the platform had 259.4 million daily active users according to Musk's graph.

The company's user base of 251 million global daily active users in Q2 2024 is actually back to where it was on Oct. 16, 2022, according to the graph, just before Elon Musk acquired the company on Oct. 28.

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As of September 2023, X was claiming it had 245 million daily active users – a number the company only shared after its CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly said the platform had 225 million daily active users while speaking at a conference.

X won't share its daily active user stats this time, according to the Financial Times. The company only disputed the outlets report and claimed that it actually saw "monthly users increase significantly in the US and UK between August last year and June this year." However, X would not provide the Financial Times with any data.

On Tuesday, @XData (X's official "Data on X" account) posted some platform stats, seemingly as a public response to the Financial Times report. The account shared metrics such as "daily user seconds" and "daily video views" stats. But it still did not provide any daily active user stats – the metric commonly used in the industry to measure growth – to counter the report's claims.

Based on the latest data we do have, it appears that Elon Musk's X has lost the daily active users it gained after the acquisition and is back to its pre-Musk 2022 user numbers.

Topics  Social Media Twitter Elon Musk