Twitter’s advertising revenue has plunged 59 percent from last year, based on an internal slide obtained by the New York Times which compared the period between April 1st and the first week of May 2022, before edgelord billionaire Elon Musk bought the company, and the same period in 2023 as established brands flee over the (selective) free speech absolutism regime Musk has wrought.
Which, when you look at it amid the frenzied MAGA circlejerk over Bug Light sales tanking, Target’s stock price taking a beating, and other “victories” following right wing boycotts over raises the question of whether it’s even worth pointing out that the market is punishing their hero in a similar way (and that Twitter is now estimated to be worth a third of what he paid). Sure, if you get into it with a MAGA troll spiking the ball over Bud Light and Target’s troubles you might want to reply with these brutal numbers for “their” brand for a laugh at their expense but then what? Can we really expect this to be a thing after so many years of them making a complete disregard for any sort of consistency, especially concerning economic concepts they don’t understand, their actual brand?
Maybe you can, actually. It took a while to percolate, but you don’t really see fanboys still pretending to claim that Trump is a smart businessman to justify their support for him anymore. That “He’s an incredibly talented real estate tycoon” line of bullshit died quietly circa 2019 when before that his well-known pre-2015 history of business failures were always spun as being somehow evidence of his acumen. The ongoing bad press about Trump’s business clusterfucks – even while he was still president – became too much for most of his fans to bear. It’s not inconceivable that the same will happen to Musk, at least as far as Twitter is concerned. Specific to this ad revenue shitshow though, no. There will be no reckoning because they can paint Musk as victim of the “corporate communists” and that “Go woke, go broke” still applies. It’s just that in this case Twitter is going broke because the advertisers went “woke” by exercising their right to not buy ads on the platform.