Available evidence shows that, nearly three years after Musk’s October 2022 acquisition, X (formerly Twitter) has not become “massively profitable,” nor has its bot problem been “cleaned up very quickly.”

Profitability and financial turnaround

• Musk financed the $44 billion Twitter deal with about $13 billion of debt, leaving X with annual interest payments estimated around $1–1.5 billion, a heavy drag on profits. (ndtv.com)
• In July 2023, Musk publicly stated that Twitter’s cash flow was still negative due to a roughly 50% drop in ad revenue plus the heavy debt load, contradicting earlier hopes for near‑term profitability. (cnbc.com)
• CEO Linda Yaccarino said in September 2023 that X was only “about break even” and merely expected to turn a profit in early 2024, underscoring that it was not yet clearly profitable, much less “massively” so. (forbes.com)
• By January 2025, Musk again acknowledged in an internal email that X was “barely breaking even,” with stagnant user growth and ongoing pressure from more than $1 billion a year in interest payments, indicating the business had not been transformed into a strongly profit‑generating operation. (theverge.com)
• External indicators are consistent with a strained, not “massively profitable,” company: Fidelity marked down its stake to imply X was worth about $15 billion as of mid‑2023 (over 70% below the $44 billion purchase price), and when Musk sold X to his own AI company xAI in March 2025, it was valued at $33 billion—still materially below what he paid. (businessinsider.com)
• Industry forecasts show X’s ad revenue only beginning to grow again in 2025 and still remaining well below 2021 pre‑Musk levels, suggesting the core business has not been transformed into a dominant profit engine. (businessinsider.com)

Overall, the best available reporting points to a platform that may be near break‑even with some improvement, but not one that has clearly become “massively profitable” within a few years of the acquisition.

Bot problem

• A peer‑reviewed PLOS One study (2025) analyzing X after Musk’s acquisition found that hate‑speech levels remained about 50% higher than pre‑takeover for many months, and that the prevalence of bot and bot‑like accounts did not decrease and may have increased, directly contradicting the notion that bots were quickly “cleaned up.” (phys.org)
• Broader 2024–2025 research and audits estimate that anywhere from ~15% up to 60%+ of X accounts could be bots, implying tens to hundreds of millions of automated or inauthentic accounts, with no clear consensus evidence of a substantial platform‑wide reduction relative to pre‑Musk levels. (twitter.com)
• X’s own transparency efforts show ongoing large‑scale enforcement rather than a solved problem: a 2023 report cited 5.3 million account suspensions in six months, and in 2025 X announced removal of about 1.7 million reply‑spam bots and said it was now turning its attention to DM spam. These steps indicate continued, significant bot activity requiring remediation, not a bot problem that has been “largely” resolved. (apnews.com)

Given (1) X is, by Musk’s own description, only around breakeven at best and still burdened by heavy debt and reduced valuation, and (2) independent research finds bot and inauthentic activity has not materially declined and may have worsened, Jason’s prediction that Musk would “turn [Twitter] around pretty quickly and make it massively profitable” and “clean up the bot problem very quickly” has not come true as of late 2025.