Elon Musk’s X suffers sales and profit slump before Grok fallout
Turnover and profit at the UK arm of X fell sharply in its second year after being taken over by Elon Musk, it has been revealed.
The division’s turnover was slashed from £69.1m to £28.8m in 2024, accounts filed late with Companies House show.
The results also confirm that Twitter UK’s pre-tax profit was cut from £2.2m to £767,000 over the same period.
The figures compare to a turnover of £205.3m and pre-tax profit of £8.5m that the company achieved in 2022.
The social media platform was bought by Elon Musk that year and later renamed X. In 2022, its UK headcount stood at 399, a number which fell to 114 in 2023 and further to 76 in 2024.
Over that time, Elon Musk’s company has spent more than £22m on redundancy payments.
The platform has been in the headlines in recent days after reports of users being able to prompt its built-in chatbot, Grok, to generate explicit images of adults and children.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was urged to pull his government off Elon Musk’s social media platform after a former cabinet minister dubbed the platform ‘unconscionable’.
Advertisers shunning Elon Musk’s X
In a statement signed off by the board on its 2024 results, X said: “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.
“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.
“In addition, the business is also diversifying advertising revenue by building small and medium-sized businesses and performance advertising revenue streams through the development of new advertising solutions and a refreshed sales go-to-market strategy.
“The company’s performance for the financial year has aligned with expectations in relative terms, notwithstanding a decline in revenue.”
The accounts for 2025 are due to be filed with Companies House by the end of September 2026.