UK revenues at Elon Musk’s X fell by almost 60% in a year as advertisers pulled their spending over concerns about the social media platform’s content.
News of the plummeting financial performance comes after X switched off the image creation function on its AI tool Grok for the vast majority of users after a widespread outcry about its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery.
In the UK, the social media site recorded a 58.3% fall in revenues from £69.1m in 2023 to £28.9m last year, according to the latest financial figures published at Companies House covering the year to 31 December 2024.
Pre-tax profits plunged from £2.2m to £767,000 year-on-year. That contrasts with £8.5m in pre-tax profits in 2022, the year Musk took control of the site then known as Twitter.
“The significant decrease in the performance of the company is a result of the decline of advertising revenue primarily driven by a reduction in spend from large brand advertisers due to concerns about brand safety, reputation and/or content moderation,” X said.
“The business continues to take proactive measures to build brand safety tools, invest in platform safety and content moderation and then educate advertisers about these initiatives.”
Since Musk completed his $44bn takeover of the platform at the end of 2022, the social media company’s commercial performance has plummeted and 80% of UK staff have been cut.
Total staff numbers in the UK fell by a third last year, from 114 to 76 – compared with a workforce of 399 when Musk took over. X said that from the point of acquisition until the end of last year, it had recognised more than £22m in redundancy costs.
In an onstage interview at an event in New York in 2023, Musk told advertisers who had pulled money from X over his endorsement of an antisemitic tweet to “go fuck yourself”.
Months later the billionaire went on to sue major companies including Unilever, the Marmite-to-Dove conglomerate, accusing them of unlawfully conspiring in a “massive advertiser boycott”.
Musk dropped Unilever from the lawsuit in 2024, but others – including the food and consumer goods groups Mars, Nestlé and Colgate-Palmolive – are still being pursued.
Despite ongoing issues with content across the platform, X claims in its accounts that it has become the “platform of choice for world-changing conversations, events and breaking news, ranging from presidential elections, to the latest developments in AI, to international sports events”.
The company said that following Musk’s takeover it had taken “significant steps to reduce its cost base and improve its financial performance”.
The site’s Grok AI tool was restricted on Friday after Musk was threatened with fines, regulatory action and amid reports of a possible ban on X in the UK.
The tool had been used to manipulate images of women to remove their clothes and put them in sexualised positions. The functionality has been switched off, except for paying subscribers.
Users making such requests on the site receive an automated response from Grok that says: “Image generation and editing are currently limited to paying subscribers.”