X Investor Torches Elon Musk for Mindblowing “Destruction” of X Value

The value of X, formerly known as Twitter, has tanked since Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover—and investors are not happy.

The billionaire purchased the social media behemoth for $44 billion, with the help of massive bank loans. But after Musk introduced his radical changes to the site—which included laying off 75 percent of its employees, crippling the site’s verification system, and changing the algorithm to promote more advertisements, irrelevant content, and antisemitism—interest in the company has plummeted. In the CEO’s own words, the company has lost 90 percent of its value since Musk bought it out.

“Elon’s done a tremendous amount of wealth destruction since he’s purchased Twitter,” longtime Tesla bull Ross Gerber told The Washington Post. Gerber reportedly has invested less than $1 million in the company but now considers the stake worthless.

“For the people who put capital into [Elon] for any amount,” Gerber told the Post, “trying to explain to people how he lost” so much money “is not a fun conversation.”

Gerber has also given Musk a six-month deadline to fix Tesla’s stock performance, or else he intends to exit his position. Gerber told Business Insider Sunday that he receives daily calls from clients asking him to pull out from the electric vehicle company, in which he holds $60 million shares, citing Musk’s erratic behavior on social media.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder, remains one of the platform’s largest investors. But even Dorsey has lost an estimated $720 million, according to the Post. Last year, Dorsey posted on the Twitter competitor BlueSky that he didn’t believe Musk should have purchased the site.

“It all went south,” Dorsey said, referring to the acquisition.

But not all of Musk’s investors are upset. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has invested the most in X after Musk himself, with nearly $2 billion rolled into the company, told the Post that he’s still very happy with his investment and felt that there was “no devaluation whatsoever.”

“When you evaluate X, you have to evaluate their ownership in xAI of 25 percent,” Alwaleed said, noting that a renewed focus for the company needs to involve bringing back major advertisers to the platform. “Clearly, the game right now is monetization, having advertisers coming to X.”

Unfortunately for Alwaleed, advertisers have made it clear that they can’t exit the platform fast enough. In response, Musk sued a group of advertisers last month to essentially bully them back onto X, a surefire way to make business connections.

Elon Musk says he “can’t wait” to take on a role in Donald Trump’s administration.

For the past several months, Trump’s team has been plotting the creation of a “government efficiency commission” to help him audit and cut government programs, should he return to the White House, according to The Washington Post. Musk has been floated as one of the top business leaders who could join the commission.

Just after midnight on Tuesday, Musk giddily posted, “I can’t wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.”

The idea of Musk joining Trump’s administration was also a topic of discussion during the former president and the X CEO’s multi-hour “interview” in August, after which Musk posted that he’s “willing to serve.” Meanwhile, Musk continues to help raise millions for his pro-Trump America PAC.

Unfortunately for Musk, just last week it seemed that Trump was trying to push him out of any position in his Cabinet.

“He wants to be involved. Now, look, he’s running big businesses and all that, so, he can’t really—I don’t think he’d be [free] for the Cabinet,” said Trump in an interview on The Shawn Ryan Show last week. “I’d put him in the Cabinet, absolutely, but I don’t know how he could do that with all the things he’s got going,” he continued.

Over the weekend, Trump also appeared to make fun of the fellow billionaire, impersonating him at the Moms for Liberty summit in Washington, D.C.

J.D. Vance gave heavy praise to a 2017 Heritage Foundation report that suggested restricting reproductive rights and called hunger a “great motivation” for Americans to work.

Vance wrote the report’s introduction, and was even the keynote speaker when it was publicly released just months after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, according to The New York Times. At the time, Vance hadn’t yet entered politics, and was known as the author of the bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy.

The Index of Culture and Opportunity report consists of 29 essays from people from across the conservative movement, including commentators, members of the clergy, policy experts, and local community leaders. In addition to saying there’s an upside to people going hungry, the essays opposed fertility treatments including in vitro fertilization, calling them harmful to women. The writers also praised state-level laws restricting abortion and hoped the procedure would be “unthinkable” one day in America.

The report seems like a preview of the Republican policies that have been pushed in the years since, with essays calling for women to be pregnant at younger ages and extolling heterosexual couples as “ideal” for raising children. When asked, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance campaign said Vance didn’t edit the essays or have “any input on the commentary.”

But in his introduction to the report, Vance tied economic distress with what he viewed as cultural decline, arguing that Americans needed a return to conservative values along with practical solutions like education and policy changes to fix their lives.

“Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as ‘the least of these,’” he wrote in the Index of Culture and Opportunity report. “It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse.”

Since Trump named him as his running mate, Vance has taken a lot of heat for his past comments, many of which had to do with his views on family life. He’s faced heavy criticism for attacking people without children, not just from politicians but from celebrities. This latest revelation is a reminder of his ties to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which was behind the infamous Project 2025 manifesto that Vance and Trump have unsuccessfully tried to distance themselves from. At this point, Republicans have to be wondering if Vance’s efforts in the conservative movement, considered an asset to the GOP, will hurt their chances in November.

It seems that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pro–Donald Trump spoiler campaign isn’t going too well.

The failed independent presidential candidate has begun desperately attempting to scrape his name off the ballot in battleground states where his presence might give Kamala Harris a boost—but to no avail. While Kennedy once struggled to get on the ballot in several states, now he can’t seem to find his way off.

Kennedy is suing North Carolina’s State Board of Elections, after it declined to remove his name from the state’s ballot because 1.7 million ballots had already been printed and 67 of the state’s 100 counties have already received their ballots.

To pause or disrupt ballot printing could interfere with the distribution of absentee ballots, according to the board’s executive director, Karen Brinson Bell. Printing new ballots could cost in the high six-figure range and take nearly two weeks, said Bell.

Last week, the board voted 3–2 along partisan lines to keep Kennedy’s name on the ballot. In response, a lawsuit has been filed on Kennedy’s behalf demanding that he be removed.

“By refusing to acknowledge Kennedy’s statutory rights and entitlements, defendants have irreparably harmed him,” said the lawsuit, which was filed in Wake County Superior Court late last month. “Even worse, by forcing Kennedy to remain on the ballot against his will, defendants are compelling speech in violation of (the Constitution).”

The suit argues that “practicality” is not a valid legal standard by which the board can deny Kennedy’s request.

Kennedy’s inability to slink out of the race in key battleground states has the potential to hurt the Trump campaign. Kennedy even said that his own campaign’s polling showed that it would “likely hand the election over to the Democrats” if he remained on the ballot in certain states. As the race between Harris and Trump narrows, the likelihood of his spoiling Trump’s chances too only increases.

In North Carolina, Trump has retained a one-point lead, but a new report last week found that Harris had shored up support among Democratic and independent voters, gaining 13 points with each group. As a result, the Cook Political Report updated the race from a “leaning Republican” rating to a “toss-up.”

Kennedy’s requests to be removed from the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin have also been denied. Election officials in Michigan said that minor parties were unable to withdraw from the ballot, while officials in Wisconsin said that anyone who filed nomination papers and qualified to appear on the ballot could not decline the nomination.

In the less than two weeks since Kennedy announced he was suspending his campaign to throw his weight behind Trump, the whale-decapitator has made clear that he intends to stay on the ballot in some states but not others. He has successfully removed himself from the ballot in other battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona.

A top volunteer is no longer with Donald Trump’s campaign over fears that the former president is wasting resources in a nonnegotiable state.

Tom Mountain, a former vice chair of Trump’s effort in Massachusetts, will reportedly “no longer have any involvement” in helping the Republican presidential nominee, according to The Boston Globe. At issue was an alarm-raising email that Mountain sent out on Sunday, notifying fellow Trump volunteers that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state” and that staff should redirect campaign efforts in Pennsylvania.

According to Mountain, Trump was “sure to lose by an even higher margin” in New Hampshire than in the previous two election cycles, citing “campaign data/research.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by a hair in 2016, clinching a minuscule margin of 0.37 percent with 2,736 votes.

The messaging was a near complete reversal for the Trump campaign, which had high ambitions of claiming the Granite State when President Joe Biden was still the Democratic presidential nominee.

Officials with the Trump campaign didn’t give the warning much merit and were quick to attack Mountain’s position in the campaign. In an interview with the Globe, Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said that to describe Mountain as a “leading volunteer” would be a “massive overstatement of his involvement.”

“This isn’t true,” Hughes said in reference to Mountain’s email. “President Trump’s campaign maintains an on-the-ground presence in New Hampshire, including staff and offices, while Kamala Harris is parachuting in because she knows that the Granite State is in play. We look forward to building on the momentum that we have grown since the primary and sending New Hampshire’s four electoral votes to President Trump’s column on November 5.”