{"text":[[{"start":4.52,"text":"It’s almost four years since Elon Musk completed his purchase of what was then Twitter, announcing to the world that “the bird is freed”. That bird hasn’t exactly soared, but its beak remains deeply wedged into the world’s psyche. And in Silicon Valley at least, there is a rising sense that it is experiencing a resurgence."}],[{"start":23.48,"text":"X, as it is known now, differs from old Twitter in four significant ways. Posts can be longer, a feature exploited by users like wordy financier Bill Ackman. Some influential users — Donald Trump, notably — are back. And Musk has integrated his AI bot Grok into the platform, while also folding the whole enterprise into his $2tn rocket company SpaceX."}],[{"start":47.68,"text":"There’s a big financial change too: revenue has withered. In 2022, Twitter had $5.1bn of annual sales, mostly from ads, and its executives expected $9.8bn by 2025. In the event, last year X and Grok combined made just $3.2bn. Musk’s moderation-lite pursuit of “free speech”, and his own political adventures, led to an advertiser exodus."}],[{"start":73.2,"text":"But in the worlds of tech and politics, X is still canon. Apple’s new CEO John Ternus began posting from a new account within hours of starting on the job. When ex-Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon wanted to warn that his former employer might destroy the planet, he told the Wall Street Journal but then swiftly put out a lengthy thread on X. Anthropic’s head of making AI safe agreed with him, also on X."}],[{"start":97.36,"text":"The data tells an equivocal story. Monthly user numbers have slipped or stagnated for at least a year, according to Similarweb. But average time spent on the site or app has increased to three minutes per visit, compared with a little over two minutes a year ago."}],[{"start":112.32,"text":"Figures from consumer data provider HundredX, meanwhile, show more than a third of X users are considering, or might consider, switching platforms — most often to upstart rival Bluesky. Nonetheless, the share of respondents providing feedback on the platform hasn’t much changed, suggesting they don’t, in practice, decamp."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":129.88,"text":"As well as stickiness, X definitely has some things most of its rivals don’t, such as a deep-pocketed owner and armies of Wall Street boosters. Morgan Stanley, whose bankers co-underwrote SpaceX’s public offering and funded the Twitter purchase, suggests with a straight face that revenue at X and Grok could approach $35bn by 2030."}],[{"start":152,"text":"For investors in SpaceX, even if those estimates prove wildly optimistic, the presence of X is a positive. It gives Musk a megaphone, and its contribution to his personal stature helps explain why the tech conglomerate trades at 21 times next year’s forecast revenue, or triple the multiple of Facebook owner Meta Platforms."}],[{"start":172.64,"text":"Consider that Musk paid $44bn for Twitter back in 2022. If present-day X has managed to juice up SpaceX’s valuation multiple by just 0.4 times, by giving Musk more airtime and attention, then theoretically it has already paid for itself. Being talked about really is more valuable than being liked."}],[{"start":196.96,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792382305_4062.mp3"}