Wait a minute. Has Elon Musk really turned Twitter around, after all?

• Elon Musk bought Twitter/X for $44 billion in 2022, and immediately saw his advertisers and advertising money disappear.
• Twitter's value plunged, accordingly. Now it seems to have recovered.
• Without real access to Twitter's financials, it's hard to assess what's really happening. But it's possible that investors don't care — they just want to be in the Elon Musk business.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 — after spending months trying not to buy Twitter — the world's richest man said he'd overpaid for the company.

Then Musk drove down the value of his asset even more, by scaring off advertisers and users. Some investors who'd helped Musk finance the deal eventually marked down the value of Twitter — which he's since renamed X — by nearly 70%.

But now investors are reportedly saying that Twitter/X is worth $44 billion, after all. One of those investors may be Elon Musk himself.

So what happened? Did Musk really turn Twitter around?

That's an open debate, and part of it depends on where you stand on the political spectrum. Here are some things we know:

• Though lots of high-profile people have left Twitter, plenty of high-profile people still use Twitter. And though Bluesky and Meta's Threads and even Donald Trump's Truth Social have been positioned as Twitter rivals, they don't seem to have anything like the cultural and political relevancy that Twitter still has. Meanwhile, while Musk's alliance with Donald Trump has had some downsides for his company — ask Tesla shareholders — there's still a sense that his direct connection to the White House means his portfolio companies will benefit from Trump 2.0.
• There are lots of stories about advertisers returning to Twitter — either because they think the US political shift means it makes sense to be there, or, as my colleague Lara O'Reilly has reported, because they want to avoid legal and political headaches. But I am a frequent Twitter user and I have yet to see any sign of Big Brand Ads returning to my timeline. Which suggests to me that brands who are returning aren't really doing it with gusto — instead, they're "playing defense," as an ad executive told Lara.

Those observations don't seem like a reason to boost Twitter back to the price Musk paid for it in 2022. Which, again, was considerably higher than public market investors thought Twitter was worth to begin with.

But that's a vibes-based analysis. What about about the financials?

Here, we don't have a lot to go on other than reporting from Bloomberg and the Financial Times, whose journalists have either seen or heard the pitch Twitter boosters have been making to investors in recent weeks. They report, citing people familiar with the matter, that while Twitter's revenue is still way down from where it was pre-Musk, the company had an "adjusted" EBITDA of $1.2 billion in 2024 — in the ballpark of what Twitter was doing pre-Musk.

That sounds pretty good! If you're an investor in an advertising-based company, you'd be concerned about all of that advertising money evaporating. But you'd be encouraged by the fact that Musk seems to be making as much on the bottom line as old Twitter. It implies a lot of upside if advertising really does come back.

Except… we don't really know what that $1.2 billion "adjusted EBITDA" number really means. An unnamed source with knowledge of X's finances tells the FT the number is "wildly adjusted" but doesn't elaborate; Bloomberg said the figure includes "a significant list of adjustments that help boost the numbers." Those seem like very important caveats. And without knowing what they actually are, you can't really assess how Twitter is actually doing. A Twitter rep declined to comment on the company's financials.

But we do have one more data point that helps explain why investors are willing to act as if Twitter has turned around, regardless of its P&L: Twitter owns a $6 billion stake in xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company that relies in part on data generated by Musk's Twitter/X. And investors are very excited about that company, because investors are excited about AI.

So if you can own part of one Elon Musk company that may or may not be on the turnaround, but it comes with part of another Elon Musk company that could be red-hot, then… maybe you do it?

To be sure: A stake in a privately held AI company could be worth a lot more, one day, when the AI race shakes out. Or it could be worth much less.

Along the same lines: Over the past decade or so we've seen lots of supposedly hot private tech companies get a rude reality check when public investors get a chance to assess their prospects and decide they're worth much less than their private backers thought. And the flip side of that is that people who put money into Tesla or SpaceX years ago are very, very happy with their decision.

And as I noted last summer when Twitter appeared to be at its financial nadir, lots of the people associated with Musk's Twitter deal don't really care what happens to Twitter. They simply want to be in business with Elon Musk so they can continue to be in business with Elon Musk. And as long as that's the case, it's going to be very, very hard to understand what Twitter is truly worth.