How Musk's $44B Twitter buy fell to $9.4B — then merged into a $1.25T empire

In October 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, promising to turn the social network into an "everything app." After the deal, the company was renamed X, cut roughly 80% of its staff, and overhauled its approach to content moderation.

Just two years later, investment firm Fidelity, which had helped finance the deal, marked X's value down to $9.4 billion — nearly 79% below the purchase price. The decline was gradual: Fidelity had already recorded a 71.5% markdown by November 2023, before cutting the valuation to its low point by August 2024.

• October 2022 — Twitter purchased for $44 billion
• November 2023 — Fidelity values X at 71.5% below the purchase price
• August 2024 — Fidelity's valuation bottoms out at $9.4 billion (-79%), as ad revenue collapses roughly 50%

The collapse was driven by an advertiser exodus — advertising had been the company's primary revenue source. Major brands scaled back or fully halted ad campaigns amid concerns over content safety and abrupt shifts in the platform's moderation policy.

That wasn't the end of the story, though. In March 2025, X completed a secondary equity deal that restored its valuation to $44 billion, as major advertisers including Apple and Amazon returned and the company's financials improved. Then, on March 28, 2025, Musk's xAI startup announced it had acquired X in a deal valuing the social network at $33 billion, with the combined company valued at $113 billion. Musk himself summed up the logic behind the merger this way: "xAI and X's futures are intertwined."

xAI and X's futures are intertwined

Consolidation didn't stop there either: in February 2026, xAI merged into SpaceX, with the combined entity valued at $1.25 trillion ($1 trillion for SpaceX, $250 billion for xAI). We previously covered how X launched its payments service, X Money — though it isn't really "Musk's bank," as it's sometimes described, and separately took a deep look at the full story of Grok and xAI, the AI chatbot now built directly into the platform.

Traced from start to finish — the $44 billion purchase, the collapse to $9.4 billion, the recovery back to $44 billion, and finally absorption into a multi-trillion-dollar SpaceX — X's story shows that the platform's market value increasingly depends less on the ad-driven model it started with, and more on how successfully it's woven into Musk's much larger AI and space empire.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.