After years of trying to revive his flailing social media company, Elon Musk has pulled off a turnaround at X. It comes after Musk decided to merge X with his artificial intelligence company xAI. The deal values the combined business at over $100 billion. WSJ’s Alexander Saeedy explains how Musk has pulled the app formerly known as Twitter back from the brink of bankruptcy, thanks in part to his proximity to President Donald Trump. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: - The Musk-Twitter Saga -- from The Journal. - Trump 2.0: The Musk-Trump Bromance Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
The platform formerly known as Twitter has had a tough couple years. The difficulties began in 2022 when Elon Musk purchased it for $44 billion.
The world's richest man bought the social media platform last week. Nearly a million Twitter users leave as Elon Musk takes over.
Advertisers continue to flee the platform, many of them citing Musk's controversial moves as the company... Musk said Twitter was quickly losing money and filing for bankruptcy is not out of the question.
Elon Musk is scrambling quite simply to prevent the social media platform from collapsing.
To buy Twitter, which Musk renamed X, he and a small group of investors spent some $30 billion of their own money. But Musk also had to borrow $13 billion more from big banks like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. And as the platform started to struggle, those banks felt the pain. Here's our colleague, Alexander Saidi, who covers banking.
It was a really tough deal for the banks. They were stuck holding debt that, you know, while they were getting paid interest on it, they don't want to, you know, have their money tied up in these loans. So it wasn't something they loved. But we're talking now because the story's changed. The story has changed.
While another one of Musk's big-name companies, Tesla, has been in a slump recently, X has seen a huge turnaround. Last month, the company reached its highest valuation since Musk took over. And he said that X is now worth more than the $44 billion he paid for it.
It's as much of the company's performance as it is, one, the world's richest man owns this company, and two, he's now very close with the most powerful man in the United States, the president.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, April 16th. Coming up on the show, how Elon Musk pulled off a comeback for X. It didn't take long after Musk's takeover of Twitter for the company to stumble. One of his first moves, besides renaming the site to X, was to lay off many of the company's workers.
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