The short version: X (formerly Twitter) has no public share price because it’s not a listed company, but the clearest recent marker is the $33 billion valuation Elon Musk put on it when he merged it into xAI in March 2025, down from the $44 billion he paid for the whole company in October 2022. For advertisers, the exact figure matters less than the story behind it: a platform whose value has been cut by roughly a quarter, largely because big brands stopped trusting it enough to spend on it, which is precisely the risk you’re buying into if you put money there now.
What X is worth right now, in one number
Thirty three billion dollars. That’s the figure Musk’s own company, xAI, used when it absorbed X in an all-stock deal announced in March 2025, folding the social platform into the AI business alongside a separate $80 billion valuation for xAI itself. It’s worth saying plainly: this wasn’t a sale to an outside buyer with due diligence and competing bids. It was Musk valuing his own asset for a deal with his other own company. That’s not a criticism of the maths, it’s a fact you should hold onto every time someone quotes you a Twitter valuation as if it’s gospel.
Before that merger, the most reliable outside markers came from Fidelity, one of the investment funds that helped Musk finance the original buyout and holds a stake through its mutual funds. Fidelity is required to mark its holdings to what it believes they’re worth each month, and its filings became the closest thing the public had to an independent price check. Those marks told a brutal story on their own: by mid-2023, Fidelity’s filings implied Twitter was worth somewhere around $15 billion, roughly a third of what Musk paid less than a year earlier. Later filings moved that number around, sometimes up, sometimes down again, landing at various points between $9 billion and $19 billion depending on the month you looked.
The valuation rollercoaster, from $44 billion to $33 billion
Walk through the timeline and the pattern is obvious.
- October 2022: Musk completes the $44 billion buyout, funded partly by his own money, partly by banks, partly by investors including Fidelity, Sequoia, and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding.
- Mid to late 2023: Fidelity’s mutual fund filings mark the stake down repeatedly, at one stage implying a company value close to $15 billion.
- Late 2023 into 2024: further markdowns and a partial recovery follow, with different filings implying figures anywhere from around $9 billion to $19 billion.
- March 2025: Musk merges X into xAI in a stock swap that formally values X at $33 billion, including debt.
That’s not a company steadily proving its worth. That’s a company whose value has been guessed at repeatedly by people with a financial interest in the guess landing favourably, and it still hasn’t come close to what was paid for it. If you ran a business that lost a quarter of its value in three years while its owner kept insisting everything was going brilliantly, you’d ask questions. Advertisers should be asking the same ones.
Why a private company’s “worth” is basically an educated guess
Here’s the bit that gets glossed over in most coverage of this story: X isn’t publicly traded, so there’s no minute-by-minute share price, no stock ticker, nothing you can check the way you’d check Meta’s or Alphabet’s value. Every number you read, including the $33 billion figure, is somebody’s internal estimate, a private deal price, or a fund’s own mark-to-market judgement. There’s no market of buyers and sellers setting the price in real time.
That matters for advertisers because it means the “value” of X tells you almost nothing about whether it’s a good place to spend your money this quarter. A company can be privately valued at $33 billion and still be losing major advertisers, still be running at a fraction of its old US ad revenue, still be shedding senior ad sales staff. Valuation and ad performance are only loosely connected once ownership goes private and the usual scrutiny disappears.
The advertiser exodus that moved the number
The reason X’s value has struggled to recover isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t really about the algorithm or the rebrand from a blue bird to an X. It’s about advertisers walking away and staying away.
In November 2023, IBM, Apple, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, and others paused advertising after reports that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi and antisemitic content, following Musk’s own endorsement of a post pushing an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Days later, at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Musk told advertisers who’d left to “go fuck yourself,” directing the line squarely at Disney’s Bob Iger while cameras rolled. It’s rare for a CEO to tell his own customers that on stage, and it’s a moment worth remembering whenever anyone tells you the advertiser boycott was overblown media noise.
Independent estimates from analysts including eMarketer put X’s US advertising revenue down by more than half in the year following Musk’s takeover, a collapse most legacy media platforms never recover from. In August 2024, X sued a group of major advertisers and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), the World Federation of Advertisers’ brand safety initiative, accusing them of running an illegal boycott. GARM shut down within weeks rather than fight it. Whatever you think of the legal merits, the lawsuit itself is a signal: a platform suing its own former customers isn’t a platform operating from a position of advertiser strength.
What I saw when I tested X ads against LinkedIn for a client
I ran a small paid test in spring 2025 for a fintech client based in Manchester, split fairly evenly between X and LinkedIn, aimed at booking product demos with finance directors at mid-sized firms. The cost per click on X came in cheap, around 40p, against roughly £1.10 on LinkedIn. On a spreadsheet that looks like X wins hands down.
It didn’t. Demo bookings from the X traffic sat close to zero across a few weeks of spend. LinkedIn converted at around 4 percent of clicks to booked demos. The audience on X clicking that ad simply wasn’t the audience with a business card and a budget behind it, and no amount of cheap clicks fixes that. I’ve had versions of this same conversation with several UK small business owners since, people running B2B marketing on Twitter who assumed a lower cost per click meant a better deal, when really it meant a different, thinner audience.
That’s the uncomfortable bit nobody selling you “X is undervalued, get in early” content wants to say out loud: cheap reach on a platform that’s shed its trusted, high-spending audience isn’t a bargain, it’s a warning sign dressed up as an opportunity.
Why some advertisers are quietly coming back anyway
Here’s the part most coverage of this story skips entirely. Some of the same brands that publicly paused spending in 2023 have quietly resumed buying ads on X through programmatic exchanges and agency trading desks rather than direct deals, precisely so it doesn’t show up as a headline “we’re back on X” announcement. It’s cheaper attention, bought through a system layered enough that nobody has to put their name on it. I’ve seen media buyers admit this off the record more than once: the boycott was real, but the retreat from the boycott has been deliberately quiet, because nobody wants to be the brand that publicly makes up with Musk after his DealBook comment.
Musk’s growing political influence through 2025, tied to his role advising the Trump administration and running DOGE, has also given X a different kind of pull with advertisers who want proximity to that access, separate entirely from audience quality or brand safety. That’s not a reason to spend there. It’s a reason to be honest about why some spend is trickling back regardless of the numbers.
A step-by-step way to decide if X deserves your ad budget in 2026
If you’re weighing whether to put money into X this year, work through this before you commit a penny.
- Step 1: Pull your last 90 days of X analytics if you’ve already got a presence there. Look at click-through rate and, more importantly, what happens after the click. Impressions mean nothing on their own.
- Step 2: Run a small test budget, no more than 10 percent of what you’d spend on your main channel, for two to three weeks, tracking one clear conversion action, not vanity engagement.
- Step 3: Compare cost per qualified lead, not cost per click, against your best-performing existing channel, whether that’s Meta, LinkedIn, or Google.
- Step 4: Check who’s seeing your ads. X’s paid Blue subscriber base skews differently than the platform’s audience did pre-2022, and that shift matters more for B2B than B2C.
- Step 5: Set a hard stop date and a hard number. If the test hasn’t produced qualified pipeline by then, walk away and put the budget somewhere with a track record.
This isn’t complicated maths, but I’m consistently surprised how many businesses skip step 5 and let a sunk cost turn into a habit.
What this means if you’re not spending money, just posting
Not every business is buying ads on X, plenty are just showing up organically, and that’s a different calculation entirely. If your team is spending hours a week manually posting and monitoring replies, it’s worth asking whether a Twitter tool is still worth using in 2026, given how much the platform’s own features have changed since Musk’s takeover. Features that agencies built entire workflows around, like the old Twitter Moments function for grouping your best tweets into a single curated thread for new followers, are gone now, and if you’re still hunting for a workaround, there are still ways to group your best tweets even though the feature itself disappeared.
If your organic presence on X is mainly about keeping an ear on your industry rather than driving leads, that’s a legitimate reason to stay, and it’s worth setting up a proper way to track industry conversations using a Twitter aggregator rather than doom-scrolling your feed hoping something useful appears. That’s a fine use of the platform in 2026. Spending real ad money on it without checking your own numbers first isn’t.
If your question is a different Twitter (X) one, the Twitter (X) guide lists every answer I have written.
Frequently asked questions
How much is Twitter (X) worth today?
The most recent reliable marker is $33 billion, the valuation Elon Musk used when he merged X into his AI company, xAI, in March 2025. That’s down from the $44 billion he paid to buy the whole company outright in October 2022, and it’s a private valuation, not a publicly traded share price.
Why did Twitter’s value drop so much after Musk bought it?
Mostly because major advertisers, including IBM, Apple, Disney, and Comcast, paused spending in late 2023 after ads appeared next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi content, and many never fully returned. Investment fund Fidelity’s own filings tracked this decline, at various points marking Twitter’s implied value as low as $9 billion to $15 billion.
Does X’s low valuation mean advertising there is cheap and worth trying?
Clicks and impressions on X are often cheaper than on LinkedIn or Meta, but cheap reach only helps if the audience clicking converts, and testing has repeatedly shown that the audience left on X skews away from higher-spending B2B and brand-safety-conscious advertisers. Test small, track qualified leads not clicks, and set a hard stop date before you commit real budget.
Are advertisers going back to X in 2026?
Some are, quietly, often through programmatic ad exchanges and agency trading desks rather than direct public deals, partly to avoid the reputational awkwardness of publicly returning after 2023’s boycott, and partly because Musk’s growing political influence has given some brands other reasons to stay close to the platform beyond audience quality.
