I think you should look at the facts and that is that X is both way more in the media than before - both in a good and a bad way - and the userbase has grown while a significant portion of operational expenses have been cut.
https://fortune.com/2024/08/15/elon-musk-tesla-stock-sale-tw...
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payme...
I'm not sure that's a wholly accurate description? The article appears to point to sources beyond that singular comment - in particular, ostensible internal financial information:
> Ferguson based his assessment on internal second-quarter figures recently obtained by the New York Times. According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
> That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.
https://archive.ph/20230817224420/https://www.wsj.com/tech/b...
(I count "can make Starship on the side" as a QED of "making bank").
Regardless of how Starship concludes, when it does so it saves them ongoing costs, and turns "small profit" into "huge profit": either Falcon becomes redundant, or the R&D team does.
Most of those 'users' are probably bots though. The bot activity has increased massively since Musk has bought the company (just look at all the like-bots nobody seems to do anything about).
Do you have a source for that? Many of the accounts that I follow on twitter are now completely dead. I think most of them are not deleted, but they have basically no activity. This is of course very subjective, but is there any reliable data how many active user x now has?
X also receives far less media exposure than Twitter used to. For example in the U.S. about a decade ago, it was common for every ad and news broadcast to include the Twitter icon with their Twitter handle on the screen. Entire movies were made with Twitter as a central plot element (e.g. Jon Favreau’s Chef). Reporters were hired and fired based on the size of their Twitter audience.
None of that happens anymore. X gets a bit of news coverage primarily from random controversies and that’s it.