CHART: Elon Musk net worth and Twitter habit

We would never claim that correlation equals causation here, but we thought it would be interesting to see how Elon Musk's Twitter habit tracked against the explosive growth in his net worth.

Musk's first tweet, in 2010, was simply a notice that any previous Tweets on the site site were an impersonator. After that point, he was a relatively infrequent Tweeter, averaging less than one Tweet per day from 2010 through 2016. Starting in 2017, his usage starts increasing and never really slows down. Musk's most intense period of Tweeting came in Q4 2022, when he bought his favorite social network. Coincidentally, that was also the same quarter his net worth took a massive hit as the market soured on Tesla (and on tech stocks generally).

Methodology

The chart above looks at 2013 through 2023. We started in Q2 2013 because that is when Musk first appears on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which we used for net worth data. Bloomberg Billionaires Index includes Musk's public Tesla holdings as well as estimates of SpaceX and other privately held companies. The data on Musk's tweets comes from two sources. For 2013 through Q1 2022, we downloaded a spreadsheet of all Elon Musk tweets available here. For Q2 through Q4 2022, we used an analysis of Musk's Twitter behavior around the date of Twitter acquisition. Due to changes in Twitter's (now X's) API rules, there is no data available for 2023.