How to Buy X (Twitter) Stock in 2024

In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion.

After being listed for nine years on the NYSE (under the ticker symbol TWTR), the acquisition once again made Twitter a private company.*

*The deal closed in April 2022 but Twitter was not de-listed until October.

Musk financed the purchase with $26.4 billion of his own money, $7.1 billion from other investors (including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal), and $13 billion in debt from Morgan Stanley and Bank of America (the total transaction cost was $46.5 billion).

Despite Twitter (which is now called X) no longer being publicly traded, there is a way to buy shares of its stock.

Can you buy X (Twitter) stock?

X (Twitter) is not a public company, so there's no way to buy its stock in your traditional brokerage account.

However, its shares are available on Hiive.

Hiive is an investment marketplace where accredited investors can buy shares of private companies from existing shareholders.

Accreditation requirements

To qualify as an accredited investor, you must meet one of the following criteria:

• Have an annual income of $200,000 individually or $300,000 jointly.
• Have a net worth that exceeds $1,000,000, excluding your main residence.
• Be a qualifying financial professional.

Accredited investors can invest in more than 2,000 venture-backed companies on Hiive, including each of Musk's privately held companies:

• SpaceX
• Neuralink
• xAI
• The Boring Company
• X

At the time of this writing, there are 5 live orders of X stock available:

X is currently trading for $42.01 per share.

Each listing on Hiive is made by an existing shareholder who may be a current or former employee, a venture capital firm, or an angel investor.

Each seller sets their own asking price and quantity of shares available. From there, accredited buyers can accept a seller's asking price as listed, place bids, or simply add a stock to their watchlist.

To see all the bids, asks, and recent transaction data for X (and every other company on Hiive), you can register for a free account with the button below:

Register for Hiive

Can retail investors buy X stock?

Unfortunately, since X is a private company, there's no way for retail investors to buy its stock.

Given the lofty price tag Musk paid to take the company private, it seems unlikely he would be willing to take the company public again any time soon. However, in an interview in May 2023, Musk was unwilling to close the door on that possibility.

Still, I don't expect this to become a reality anytime soon.

The ARK Venture Fund

Retail investors can get exposure to X via the ARK Venture Fund. The venture fund, run by Cathie Wood, purchased a small stake in the company shortly after it became private.

Today, X makes up just 0.66% of the fund's holdings, though Wood has been trying to increase her stake in the company.

Retail investors can invest in the ARK Venture Fund — which also owns stakes in SpaceX, Epic Games, and OpenAI — via SoFi. You can learn more about how to invest on this page.

Alternatives to X

While you may not be able to invest in X, you can invest in a few of its publicly traded competitors.

• Meta Platforms (META) is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — three of the largest social media platforms. It also launched Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter, which recently hit 275 million monthly active users (MAUs)*. The company generated revenue of $156.2 billion over the last year and is valued at $1.45 trillion.
• Snap (SNAP) is the parent company of Snapchat, the 9th largest social network with 800 million MAUs. The company has a market capitalization of $21 billion on TTM revenue of $5.2 billion.
• Pinterest (PINS) combines social media with e-commerce and advertising. It has about 500 million MAUs, generated TTM revenue of $3.3 billion, and has a market cap of $22.4 billion.
• Reddit (RDDT), which became publicly traded in March 2024, is a digital community website. The company generated revenue of $981.4 million over the last 12 months and is valued at $18.8 billion.

*Dive more deeply into a company's KPIs on our Metric pages. Check out Meta's page here, where you can see user growth, revenue, and more.

You may also be interested in Alphabet (GOOGL), the parent company of Google and YouTube; Microsoft (MSFT), which owns LinkedIn; and ByteDance, which owns TikTok.

More on Musk's acquisition of Twitter (X)

Although the deal was announced and approved in April 2022, Twitter was not scheduled to be de-listed from the NYSE until October 27, 2022.

The transaction did not go smoothly.

After Musk and his team of investors submitted their tender offer to acquire Twitter, the company's board of directors initially responded to the offer by threatening to adopt a poison pill.

A poison pill is a corporate defense strategy that allows all shareholders, except the acquiring party, to buy additional shares of the company at a highly discounted price.

However, the strategy was never enacted, and shareholders ultimately approved the purchase.

Then, in May, Musk put the deal on hold due to the alleged number of spam accounts on the platform. Twitter responded with legal action to enforce the merger.

On October 4, Musk's lawyers said he would proceed with the original deal.

How has X performed under Musk's leadership?

At the time of the acquisition, Musk gave this statement:

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.

I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it."

— Elon Musk

However, the acquisition has not gone according to plan.

Twitter was already struggling financially when Musk bought it. Despite being founded in 2006 and being a public company since 2013, Twitter was still not profitable in 2022. 

Musk planned to make it profitable.

Shortly after the transaction closed, Musk fired many top executives, laid off 50% of the company's staff, and launched a subscription service for $8/month.

There have been more reductions to the workforce since then. In total, Musk has fired roughly 75% of the staff since buying the company.

After being near breakeven in early 2023, revenue cratered a few months later.

In October 2023, 50 of its top 100 U.S. advertisers stopped advertising on Twitter (which had been rebranded as X in July 2023), citing concerns over brand safety and content moderation issues. The effects have been huge.

In Q2 2024, X generated just $114 million in revenue in the U.S., down 84% from the $661 it generated in Q2 2022.

The number of X users has also trended down in recent years, peaking at about 368 million monthly active users (MAUs) in 2022 and decreasing to about 353 million MAUs in 2023. 335 million MAUs is the number projected for 2024.

How much is X worth?

Elon Musk took X private at a valuation of $44 billion, roughly 38% higher than Twitter's closing price the day before the announcement.

As mentioned above, Cathie Wood's ARK Venture Fund owns a small stake in X. In July 2023, the fund marked down its X valuation by 47%. This implied a valuation of $23.32 billion.

In May 2023, Fidelity also marked down its X valuation to $15 billion, roughly ⅓ the valuation Musk paid for the company a little over a year earlier. This was the third time Fidelity had cut its valuation since the acquisition.

In August 2024, Fidelity marked down its stake again, valuing its original investment of $19.66 million at just $4.19 million — a reduction of 78.7%. If accurate, this implies X is worth just $9.37 billion.

Here's a look at how X's valuation has changed over time:

As of April 2023, Musk said he believed the company could one day be worth $250 billion.