Has Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter been a success?

Has Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter been a success? According to the platform’s new CEO and the world’s richest man, that is a resounding yes with new sign-ups “at an all-time high” with more than 2 million new users per day.

Musk posted a Twitter state of the union (on Twitter naturally) which included slides about the company’s performance since his took control of the social media platform a month ago.

Musk said, via the graphs on his slides, that daily sign-ups have increased 66 per cent year on year from the same seven-day period in 2021.

And active minutes – the time a user spends on the site – was averaging 8 billion minutes per day as of November 15 which is a 30 per cent year on year increase.

Slides from my Twitter company talk pic.twitter.com/8LLXrwylta

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022

Another metric Musk shared was around hate speech which he says has visibly decreased.

Musk’s post also included a slide labelled Twitter 2.0 – The Everything App showing advertising as entertainment in the news feed and longer form videos.

Also outlined in another slide was a wish list of features that may be introduced including encrypted direct messages, longform tweets, a relaunch of Blue Verified and payments.

Musk has also been cagey when it comes to revenue.

The payments portion of the slide was left blank.

Musk recently announced shortly after his Twitter takeover was complete was that the company was haemorrhaging money at a rate of about $4m a day.

The recent attempt to allow users to pay for their blue ticket verifications backfired horrendously with numerous imitators and scammers coming forward to take advantage of the opportunity.

Before his takeover Musk was obsessed with confirming the number of real users and the number of bot accounts.

This is why he was placing so much emphasis on verification – and he wanted to make some money doing it.

Twitter has since parked this idea till further notice.

Musk recently ran a poll asking Twitter users whether former President Donald Trump should be allowed back on the platform.

Trump won the vote 53 per cent to 47 per cent for readmission and was promptly re-instated but he is yet to post a single tweet since – instead he’s sticking with his own Truth Social platform to express himself albeit to a far smaller audience.

I think I see a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022

Kanye West has also been readmitted to Twitter.

Reports suggest Twitter has lost almost 50 per cent of its major advertisers since Musk took over.

As of this year, Twitter has 450 million active monthly users with Musk predicting (in a reply to business author Jordan Peterson) that the platform will grow to more than a billion users in the next 12 to 18 months.