Billionaires are unpredictable people and are not your run-of-the-mill person, either. While some of them might have an impression of themselves in their own head that they can do no wrong – there’s plenty of evidence to back up that even the world’s most successful people can get it spectacularly wrong every now and again.

Twitter, formerly known as X, is now controlled by the world’s richest man—South African business magnate Elon Musk. Billionaires usually seek out company takeovers of names or brands in their fields. Still, Elon opted to buy a social media company for close to $50 billion with no previous expertise in the field, but is it a gamble that is starting to pay off?

Turning X Into The Everything App

Musk’s end goal is to turn X into a one-stop shop for news, media, and entertainment. He has, in no uncertain terms, voiced his plan to turn it into an app that allows users to do everything.

There’s been considerable noise about integrating payment systems and a lot of noise about X becoming both a gaming and casino gaming platform. Musk has spent a lot of time getting the X app onto gaming consoles, and this cross-integration, in the long run, could set up the platform as the gaming hub for streaming and as a digital community for all things related to gaming.

Casino platforms already have a longstanding presence in the industry and are their own successful standalone companies. It would be a challenge for X to break into this sector and pivot gamblers away from the communities they’ve built online. The best gambling sites you can find online share these qualities, and given that some of them have been operating online successfully for decades, it’s hard to see how X could make any serious ground.

This doesn’t just apply to online gaming, either. Social media companies like Twitch have also dominated the video game streaming market and continue to have a firm grip on licensing rights for the most prominent esports competitions, alongside YouTube.

Crunching The Numbers

Elon Musk is a polarizing figure, and it’s hard to think of a public figure who commands such a disparity in views. Millions of people seem to think of him as akin to some of the greatest human inventors of all time, and he’s achieved a significant level of fame and notoriety, particularly over the latter half of the 2010s and the early 2020s.

On the other hand, there are some who believe he is leveraging his colossal wealth to control organic forms of media and communication to his advantage—shoehorning his own companies and products into a user base of around 300 million.

In any event, Musk’s first two years at the helm at X HQ have been a rough ride. Not only has he had to deal with the incredible success of social media competitor TikTok, but the site itself is losing money at an alarming rate. While many large multi-billion dollar companies have a wide range of operational funds, user numbers are continuing to drop month by month, and advertising revenue is down by half.

Facebook continues to be the most prominent social media site, with around 3 billion users; Instagram is about half a billion behind, and Twitter is roughly 340 million. This should indicate how the social media platform is performing on a global scale, and if you were to go off these figures alone, then you’d have to say Musk has probably overpaid.

Final Thoughts

If you were to look at any current business figure or entrepreneur for advice on starting your business as a beginner, Elon Musk would stand out to many people. By investing wisely in companies like PayPal, using that money to build his fortune, and employing the right inventors and minds to power his ideas, he’s the quintessential entrepreneur in many people’s eyes.

Although most people agree that the $44 billion he paid for Twitter was completely excessive, his expertise in other areas and current advances still comfortably cement him as one of the top business minds on the planet.

As he continues to pioneer serious innovation, from advances in the driverless car sector to becoming more engrossed in AI’s potential, it feels like Twitter, or X, might slowly become a vanity project that has gone wrong – but it is still too early to tell. Musk is definitely one person not to write off.

Many business analysts have stated they wouldn’t be surprised to see Musk offload it at some point over the next few years as it continues to bleed money and lose users. The final nail in the coffin could be the substandard user experience on a site that is now inundated with spam bots, comments, scams, poor search functionality, and a hub for some rather unsavory people and views.