Scott Galloway: Elon Musk’s Twitter ‘Literally the Worst Performing Business in History’
AP Photo/John Raoux
Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher discussed the historically bad performance of Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, on a recent episode of their tech and business podcast, Pivot.
Swisher introduced the topic by noting that Musk “no longer wants advertisers to go fuck themselves.”
“We talking about Twitter? I’d love to talk about Twitter,” replied Galloway, a marketing professor and successful entrepreneur.
Swisher explained the Musk news, adding, “He told advertisers to go fuck themselves. And then he told Bob Iger to go fuck himself. But he’s done an about-face. He and CEO Linda Yaccarino are here in Cannes courting advertisers. He’s appearing at a WPP event this week. For those who don’t know. WPP is one of the largest ad agencies. X reportedly lost 52% of its U.S. advertising revenue in 2024.”
“Talk about the strategy because it’s a lot of small and medium businesses. And by that I mean, porn,” Swisher asked Galloway, referring to the companies engaging with X.
“Crypto and AI girlfriend,” joked Galloway, adding:
I don’t think there’s ever been in business. So let’s go to the other side. Nvidia at some point will own this entire city, much less this beach. But Nvidia is the most successful company in history, as registered by an increase in revenues over such a short time. No company has ever accomplished that. Going to the other end, no company over $1 billion in revenue has ever lost 60% of its revenues in a 12 month period in a non-war period.
I don’t think that’s ever happened. Twitter is literally the worst-performing business in history since a change in ownership.
Galloway went on to illustrate just why X is losing so much money in ad revenue, “And as we all sit here today, I’ll just put forward a brief quiz. Which of the following three activities are you most likely to be fired from your job in media? One: you start calling your assistant juggles. Two: you bring your mushroom chocolates to work and put them in the refrigerator with your name on it, saying do not touch property of you. Or three, you advertise on Twitter?”
“What is a bigger risk to your career? I didn’t know what was going to be next to Nazi porn. Right. That’s not going to be a good defense. Literally the fastest way to not get invited back to Cannes, because you get fired by your media company or brand for making what is on a risk-adjusted basis literally the worst decision in branding,” he concluded.
Swisher interjected, “Some people thought it was had a good ROI, some people didn’t, but it was never an effective business in general compared to the Facebooks of the world.”
“But it was a bidding platform. It did have a certain, there were certain types of advertisers that fit really well on Twitter. I like Twitter, I was pulling for Twitter. I thought they did a decent job. I mean, we were sort of all pulling for Twitter in the beginning. It’s an incredible product. And then this thing just went on, they thought, all go to subscription. Everyone loves me. We’re going to change the model. And it’s not. It’s an ad platform. Except now there’s a lot of incredibly toxic content that people don’t want to take the risk of,” Galloway replied.
Listen to the full episode above.
