One year ago, Elon Musk took over Twitter. The acquisition was the culmination of a blistering six months in which one of the world’s richest men campaigned vehemently to buy the company, then tried equally hard to wriggle out of the deal, before finally accepting defeat.

He marched into Twitter’s offices on October 26, 2022, carrying a detached bathroom sink. “Let that sink in!” he tweeted. Hilarious. The next day, the deal was complete and Musk was the proud new owner of his favorite social media platform.

Buying Twitter cost Musk an exorbitant sum—$44 billion, which comes out to a $54.20-per-share offer price (a weed joke that’d make a high-schooler roll their eyes). Despite being among the world’s wealthiest people, and proposing the sale price himself, Musk didn’t have the liquidity to pay $44 billion outright—he relied on $7 billion of equity investment and $13 billion in bank loans. The annual estimated cost of servicing this debt is $1 billion.

In the year since Musk took over Twitter, he’s overseen mass layoffs, strict rollbacks of content policies, and a pay-for-play system whereby paying users get more reach than those who pay nothing. The result has been a mass exodus of advertisers, user defections to new platforms like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads, and an abject degradation of the platform formerly known as Twitter.

It’s unlikely that Twitter was actually worth $44 billion at the time Musk proposed the deal. In fact, Musk has publicly stated that he overpaid for it. He even engaged in a monthslong legal battle to try to save himself from paying what he promised to pay.

If Twitter was ever worth anything close to $44 billion before Musk, it’s certainly worth much less now after a year of chaotic and tumultuous management.

“Usually when a platform starts to lose its value, either literally or figuratively, there are at least some external factors at play,” says Jasmine Enberg, the principal analyst for social media at the market research firm Insider Intelligence. In recent years, Snap has had massive setbacks from Apple’s iOS privacy changes and Facebook parent company Meta has struggled to fend off serious new competition from TikTok. “X’s wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted,” she says.

Before Musk took over, Twitter derived 92% of its revenue from advertising. Musk, who has publicly stated he “hates advertising,” has tried to move the company away from that dependence and to diversify revenue streams. He’s put most of his eggs in the subscription revenue basket, building the site around Twitter Blue—now called X Premium—and shifting the balance of power on the site toward anyone who will pay him $8 a month.

He’s done this all in the name of turning Twitter, now X, into an “everything app” akin to China’s WeChat—but he hasn’t actually built anything worth paying for.

“Nothing good has yet to come from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter,” says Mike Proulx, vice president and research director at the market research firm Forrester. “Under his leadership, he’s dismantled the Twitter brand, decimated the company’s primary revenue stream, and boosted the spread of misinformation. From this unhinged base, it’s hard to see how X becomes the ‘super app’ that Musk envisions.”

Advertisers have been scared off by lax content moderation practices—a reality that’s stark since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Users are clearly unhappy too: According to a new report by the firm Apptopia, Twitter has lost 13% of daily users since Musk took over last year. For reference, a bad year for a social media company typically involves slower growth, not fleeing users.

In March, Insider Intelligence estimated Twitter’s yearly advertising revenue would fall 28% in 2023. Today, the firm revised that forecast to reflect a “significant reduction” for the year. It now projects Twitter will only bring in $1.9 billion in ad revenue this year, down from $4.1 billion in 2022—a 54% drop. “X’s ad business deteriorated more quickly than we had anticipated in March, and there have been little sign of improvement,” she said. “Even though some advertisers have returned, few are spending at pre-Musk levels.”

The job of determining Twitter’s real valuation may be a fool’s errand. When Twitter was a publicly traded company, we—the public—were privy to details about its management, its top investors, and its quarterly financial results. Now, since Musk took the company private, we’re mostly in the dark.

Aswath Damodaran, a New York University professor, says he would guess that ad revenues are down and subscription revenues are up, but admits that’s “thin gruel” for a valuation.

That hasn’t stopped others from giving their own best guesses. Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said around the time of the purchase, that Twitter was only worth about $25 billion. In March, Musk himself weighed in, claiming the company is worth about $20 billion. In May, Fidelity Investments, which helped finance Musk’s deal, reported their shares at a $15 billion valuation, though it slowly increased that estimate over the summer.

Greg Martin, managing director at the firm Rainmaker Securities, which lets people trade private stock, said he’s seen bids recently at a $20 billion valuation. “That’s less than half off the price he paid for it,” Martin said in an email. “Still feels high to me.”

“Twitter is cash flow negative, despite laying off thousands of employees and reducing overall expenses significantly,” he continued. “It’s not clear how they grow out of this hole.”

Ego has damned Elon Musk’s Twitter.

Instead of slowly weaning off Twitter’s ad dependence in a down year for the ad market, he took a sledgehammer to the operation and eliminated the staff courting advertisers and the content rules that allowed them to feel comfortable running ads next to user-generated content.

“He has treated Twitter—now X—as a technology company that he could remake in his own vision, rather than a social network fueled by people and ad dollars,” Insider Intelligence’s Enberg says. “People are just as important as the technology, and what Musk has envisioned for the platform isn’t aligned with what most users or advertisers wanted or expected.”

The result is that one year after Musk acquired Twitter it’s become a worse financial drain than perhaps even he expected when tried to wrestle out of the deal last summer. Twitter is at best worth half of what he bought it for—with a debt burden that’ll plague him until he coughs up billions—likely by liquidating valuable-yet-mercurial Tesla stock—in order to pay it off.

Musk has remade Twitter in his own image, yes, but Twitter will continue to burn a hole in Musk’s pocket until something radical changes. And he might hope for that . . . a slow burn could be more painful.