Elon Musk announces that X has reached 600 million monthly active users

Now, this may not be an “official” update, as this is just a one-liner comment by Elon Musk that always ends up sparking a media overreaction (of course, I’m buying into it here).

but:

Elon claims that X now has 600 million monthly active users, with around 300 million daily active users.

This is important because just two months ago, X was reporting official usage data of 550 million monthly active users and 250 million DAU.

X also reported that it reached 500 million monthly users in March 2023, and based on these stats, it would appear that X added over 50 million users in a year, but it added another 50 million in just 8 weeks.

In terms of DAU, the growth is even more remarkable. 250 million daily active users November 2022The company reaffirmed this in March of this year, meaning that it had seen zero growth in daily active users for 16 months.

But the memo said the company now has 50 million more daily active users.

This isn’t an official statement, and Musk was pretty vague about the number of daily active users, but if this is correct, it seems like X is growing, which would be a big endorsement for the new direction of the former Bird app.

Because X needs users. According to reports, X’s ad revenue is still down about 50% from pre-Elon levels, so expanding its audience reach would surely be an added incentive to lure more people back, especially major companies.

Of course, it’s mainly Musk’s own posts and rhetoric that scares off advertising partners, but if the opportunity is too big to miss, it’s likely that many advertising partners will abandon their moral stance.

And overall, while X is relatively modest in terms of viewership right now, in at least some ways it has become less important since Musk took over the app.

But if X is indeed gaining users again, and adding at least 25 million per month, that would be significant and could signal a re-establishment of X’s popularity. This would legitimize Elon’s direction with the app and show its expanding potential, but again, we don’t know if this is an official and accurate record of X’s usage or just an estimate by Musk in response to a post.

Either way, Elon says that X usage is growing, and by a significant amount.

That may be true, but it may also be unusual.

Or it could be an indicator that X is actually doing better than expected.