A month after completing his takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk says new user signups are at an “all-time high.” On Saturday evening, the billionaire shared a slide deck that details the current state of Twitter and his vision for the platform. As of November 16th, Twitter was adding more than 2 million new users per day over the last seven days, according to one of the graphs Musk shared. He added daily signups are up 66 percent compared to the same seven-day period in 2021.
Slides from my Twitter company talk pic.twitter.com/8LLXrwylta
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022
Musk said user active minutes were also at an all-time high, with Twitter’s userbase averaging nearly 8 billion active minutes per day over the last seven days as of November 15th – representing a 30 percent increase from the same period last year. He also used a graph to claim hate speech impressions recently decreased.
Even if the data Musk shared is accurate, what it means is very much up for discussion. For instance, the graph about hate speech presents, at best, an incomplete picture of the situation. For one, note that the small print states the data only covers tweets in English. Second, there’s evidence to suggest Twitter recently stopped enforcing its hateful conduct policy as it applies to targeted harassment of trans people.
Just as important is the data Musk decided not to share. Not a single graph offers insight into Twitter’s financials, yet according to multiple reports, Musk recently told employees the company was losing so much money that bankruptcy was “not out of the question.” A more recent report suggests Twitter has lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers since Musk took the platform over.
On early Sunday, Musk told Jordan Peterson he sees “a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months.” Meeting that goal will require Twitter to dramatically increase signups. Assuming the company continues to add 2 million users per week, that’s only 104 million new users by the end of one year. Twitter has approximately 450 million monthly active users as of 2022.