“The consequences of this will be clearly felt for Musk.”

Why are companies like Apple and Disney pulling their ads on X?

“In principle, it doesn’t matter to brands where they place their ads, unless the context in which their ads appear detracts from their brand value. Musk has enormous reach: this means that many people risk seeing a reference to a brand in the context of a Musk post, creating an implicit association that this brand is in no way inconsistent with Musk’s message. American companies in particular are very cautious about this. “The surprising thing is that this is only happening now, because anyone who follows Musk knows that he has very treacherous ideas.”

What does this mean for X’s income?

“The consequences will of course be tangible for X, very tangible, because they have to live on advertising cake anyway. But Musk has been looking for another model for some time Monetizationincluding those accounts that are verified.

“The only thing he’s good at is buying shares in companies and then making big profits. And I don’t mean this sarcastically, because that’s a gift. That’s how he put Tesla on the map. His first years at Tesla were about announcing impossible deadlines, making impossible promises, And thus convincing investors. In the Twitter story, you can replace investors with advertisers, but this is where things are going wrong at the moment. In the short term, Musk will only burn more money.

Can X find income another way?

“Musk aspires to create a Western WeChat, an ‘app for everything,’ and he is convinced it will succeed. If you can do that, you don’t need advertisers.”

“Someone once described Musk as one of those Billionair. that it Bully Who does what he wants because he is swimming in money. He spent $22 billion in a few months, half of what he invested in the company. But what is 22 billion worth if you are the richest man in the world? If his big project succeeds, no one will talk about it anymore. But this big project will never succeed.

Is X doomed to fail now that major advertisers have pulled out?

“X is a bit of a special case. -eyes” and “-ists”. By “-eyes” I mean academics, who are on X.

“When Musk started tearing down Twitter, there was a huge outpouring and many people ended up on Mastodon. In one year, Mastodon has grown from less than 2 million users to about 14 million users now. However, this is nothing compared to 200 million tweets that he still owns. But the gesture was important, and the fact that Musk felt called to do this at some point Leave immediately To block Mastodon on Twitter, he noted that he was concerned at the time.

“But what surprised me was that the most prominent ‘eyes’ and ‘supporters’ remained mainly active on As long as X can keep its platform running, this situation won’t change much.