Elon Musk's X Stalls at 250M Daily Users While Threads Plays Catch-Up

X, formerly known as Twitter, is seeing user growth slow to a crawl since Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk bought the social media platform for a staggering $44 billion in mid-2022.

X's daily active user growth has plummeted from roughly 30% annually just a few years ago in 2020 to less than 2% in 2024, according to new data from X reported by the Financial Times. In the past year, X only saw 1.6% daily active user growth and has roughly 251 million daily active users, according to the report.

Its app downloads have also wavered this year, hovering around 100,000 daily iOS downloads while Meta's Threads has seen between a quarter-million and 300,000 daily iOS downloads, per AppFigures data. This year, Threads has seen more than double the iOS downloads of X in total, logging 51 million downloads compared to X's 20 million.

On Android, that ratio is similar. Threads has logged 87 million Android downloads so far this year, while X has seen roughly half that at 45 million.

Musk's X still gets lots of web browser traffic, however. The site saw over 2 billion total monthly visits, compared to Threads' 51.5 million monthly visits last month, SimilarWeb data shows. This discrepancy could likely be due to Meta's app-native design for Threads, as the social media platform has only started to add more web-friendly features like multiple pinned feeds recently.

Threads recently reported that it has 175 million monthly active users, which one analytics company Sensor Tower believes translates to about 38 million daily users. FT notes that this could mean Threads users aren't using it as often as other social media sites like X, which has a more established cohort of power users. As Threads grows, however, its users are less likely to also log onto X, which could mean these two platforms don't share entirely the same audience.

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While X is still the more popular platform overall compared to Threads, it's had nearly two decades to establish its audience. Threads, however, has seen sharp growth since its launch just one year ago, thanks to Meta promoting Threads adoption through Instagram.

Musk's changes to Twitter, like renaming it X, has been a mixed bag with some not-yet-realized plans. From trying to force X to become a video-forward app and charging users for previously free features to pushing out an AI named Grok and making likes private, Musk's X saw its revenue plunge 40% shortly after the executive took the helm.