Twitter Users Statistics – Key Data for 2026 Twitter Marketing
For the past 30 years, I have been sharing my ideas on investing, markets, the economy, policy, and related topics. Online, in public, no hold barred; writing for a broad audience invites comments, criticism, and general interaction.
So it was no surprise that when Twitter came along, I jumped in (Thanks, Howard!). It was an amazing technology that gave you access to awesome people you otherwise would not have met; it enabled cool interactions with readers. It became a community of like-minded individuals across a variety of topics. For me, this included everything from markets and investing, economic analysis, and behavioral finance to cosmology and collectible cars. Before Chart Kid Matt, many of the most-liked charts seen on The Big Picture were originally found on Twitter.
My partner Josh, always ahead of the curve, saw the writing on the wall and tapped out in 2020. I hadn’t noticed the slow bleed on the site until I was hacked in July 2023. Someone took control of the account until Bloomberg helped me get it back 3 months later. Nadig warned mw I wouldn’t recognize it. The site had changed so radically over those three months that it was hard to wrap my head around it.1
Trying to scale and monetize the site only led to a change for the worse; new ownership accelerated the collapse. Today, there is very little engagement, too many bots, and endless trolls;2 constant fake versions of myself and impersonations 3 of my colleagues have revealed how little the site cares about the security and safety of its users.4 What could have been a global town square morphed into something far more insidious. 5
And so it is with a heavy heart that I belatedly say farewell to X.
I’ll still allow the blog to auto-post; I’ll lurk on my favorite lists, and occasionally retweet others. But that’s it. You can find me here and on LinkedIn.
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1. Recently, a number of my favorite follows have headed for the exits; EFF was merely the latest.
2. Social media fraud channels contributed to 56% of all crypto scam cases in 2025, led by Telegram, X, and Instagram; AI-generated deepfake scams rose roughly 700%; fake endorsements impersonating Musk accounted for 32% of social media scam attempts. (Source: CoinLaw) According to Medium, the most visible pattern of fraud is the stock-pick scam chain: a low-follower bot posts a reply with replies disabled, tags a “financial expert” account using a stock photo and a generic handle ending in a number, and that account pushes penny-stock picks.
3. New ownership made everything worse: Paid verification inverted the old signal: a blue check now correlates positively, not negatively, with scam risk, and the algorithmic boost for paying accounts means scam replies surface above legitimate ones. (via Claude)
4. AI has lowered the cost of producing convincing content and increased variability across a botnet, making pattern-based takedowns harder, while “reply-and-block” tactics let bots register engagement and then suppress the original poster’s ranking. (via Claude)
5. It’ll be interesting to see the Harvard Business School case study of how to light $38 billion on fire.
