Elon Musk announced on Friday that monthly users of social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, had achieved a “new high,” and he released a graph displaying the most recent figure of over 540 million.
Musk’s post on X about the user counts comes as the firm undergoes organizational changes and seeks to increase advertising revenue, which has been declining in recent months.
It is also the latest in a series of comments from X executives claiming great usage traction, following the July 5 debut of Meta Platforms’ direct competitor platform, Threads.
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According to a statement made before Musk’s takeover of the company in October, Twitter had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022. In November, Musk announced that X has 259.4 million daily active users.
Musk has made a lot of product and organizational changes since taking charge. The company launched the verified blue tick as a premium service and began sharing a portion of ad sales with select platform content creators.
Musk appointed former NBCUniversal advertising head Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X in May, indicating that ad sales would be prioritized even as the platform pushed to raise subscription revenue.
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Musk stated earlier this month that X’s cash flow was negative due to a nearly 50% decline in advertising revenue and a hefty debt load, but he did not elaborate.
Meanwhile, Musk’s decision to redesign Twitter as X may be legally complicated: firms such as Meta and Microsoft already hold intellectual property rights to the same letter.
X is so widely used and mentioned in trademarks that it is ripe for legal challenges – and the firm formerly known as Twitter may face its own troubles in the future protecting its X brand.
“There’s a 100 percent chance that Twitter will be sued over this,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who noted that almost 900 existing U.S. trademark registrations already cover the letter X in a variety of businesses.
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Owners of trademarks, which protect things like brand names, logos, and slogans that identify the source of goods, can file infringement claims if alternative branding causes customer confusion. The remedies vary from monetary damages to the prohibition of use.