• YouTube is big. Really big. Really, really big.
• How big? Try this: It's about to become the biggest media company in the world. Bigger than Disney.
• Reminder: This company is only two decades old.

You're still not paying enough attention to YouTube.

I know, I know: Some of you know that YouTube is not just a big force in media, but one of the biggest. But most folks — even people who make their living in media — don't fully get how big YouTube is. Even though we keep pointing it out, over and over.

So let's try it again, this time courtesy of MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson: Measured by revenue, YouTube was the second-biggest media company in the world last year. It brought in $54.2 billion in 2024 — just $5.5 billion behind Disney.

And in 2025, Nathanson predicts, YouTube should eclipse Disney, and become the biggest media company in the world.

Reminder: YouTube started a mere 20 years ago. Google bought the company for $1.65 billion in 2006.

If you wanted to, you could quibble with Nathanson's groupings. You could argue that Google itself is actually the biggest media company in the world since it generates close to $350 billion in annual revenue, the majority of which comes from ads. And that Meta, which generated $160 billion in ad sales last year, is also much bigger. You could also point out in his comparison, Nathanson has pulled out Disney's $30+ billion-a-year parks business, which is a huge part of Bob Iger's empire and one that's directly connected to its media properties.

But like I said, quibbles. The point is that YouTube commands an extraordinary amount of time and interest from its users, who are no longer just kids but everyone. (Reminder: When you hear about politicians trying to reach audiences via podcasts, that also means they're trying to reach them via YouTube.) And that advertisers, who took some time to figure that out — but get it now — are pouring money in to reach that audience.

More evidence for YouTube's hugeness? OK. Nathanson also predicts that the company's YouTube TV subscription business is set to become the biggest pay-TV provider in the country by 2026, as it keeps adding subscribers while rivals Comcast and Charter shed theirs.

He also guesstimates that as a stand-alone company, YouTube might be worth $475 billion to $550 billion — between Meta and Netflix's valuations.

The point is: Any you slice it, numerically, YouTube is ginormous.

That scale also makes it harder to get your head around. Unlike, say, a conventional media company, or a streamer, there's no flagship network, or program, or movie that works as a shorthand for YouTube's dominance: YouTube doesn't have a "Stranger Things" or a "Barbie" or the Marvel MCU.

The closest analog would be MrBeast, but that really doesn't get at it — MrBeast is huge, but if you're not a young boy, you're probably not watching his stuff. And lots of people who consume YouTube don't really think that they're "watching YouTube" — they're just watching the thing they want to watch, which is on YouTube.

So maybe it's more helpful to think of YouTube as a utility — even if you don't think about it that much, you're using it all the time. A utility worth half a trillion dollars.

• Elon Musk bought Twitter/X for $44 billion in 2022, and immediately saw his advertisers and advertising money disappear.
• Twitter's value plunged, accordingly. Now it seems to have recovered.
• Without real access to Twitter's financials, it's hard to assess what's really happening. But it's possible that investors don't care — they just want to be in the Elon Musk business.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 — after spending months trying not to buy Twitter — the world's richest man said he'd overpaid for the company.

Then Musk drove down the value of his asset even more, by scaring off advertisers and users. Some investors who'd helped Musk finance the deal eventually marked down the value of Twitter — which he's since renamed X — by nearly 70%.

But now investors are reportedly saying that Twitter/X is worth $44 billion, after all. One of those investors may be Elon Musk himself.

So what happened? Did Musk really turn Twitter around?

That's an open debate, and part of it depends on where you stand on the political spectrum. Here are some things we know:

• Though lots of high-profile people have left Twitter, plenty of high-profile people still use Twitter. And though Bluesky and Meta's Threads and even Donald Trump's Truth Social have been positioned as Twitter rivals, they don't seem to have anything like the cultural and political relevancy that Twitter still has. Meanwhile, while Musk's alliance with Donald Trump has had some downsides for his company — ask Tesla shareholders — there's still a sense that his direct connection to the White House means his portfolio companies will benefit from Trump 2.0.
• There are lots of stories about advertisers returning to Twitter — either because they think the US political shift means it makes sense to be there, or, as my colleague Lara O'Reilly has reported, because they want to avoid legal and political headaches. But I am a frequent Twitter user and I have yet to see any sign of Big Brand Ads returning to my timeline. Which suggests to me that brands who are returning aren't really doing it with gusto — instead, they're "playing defense," as an ad executive told Lara.

Those observations don't seem like a reason to boost Twitter back to the price Musk paid for it in 2022. Which, again, was considerably higher than public market investors thought Twitter was worth to begin with.

But that's a vibes-based analysis. What about about the financials?

Here, we don't have a lot to go on other than reporting from Bloomberg and the Financial Times, whose journalists have either seen or heard the pitch Twitter boosters have been making to investors in recent weeks. They report, citing people familiar with the matter, that while Twitter's revenue is still way down from where it was pre-Musk, the company had an "adjusted" EBITDA of $1.2 billion in 2024 — in the ballpark of what Twitter was doing pre-Musk.

That sounds pretty good! If you're an investor in an advertising-based company, you'd be concerned about all of that advertising money evaporating. But you'd be encouraged by the fact that Musk seems to be making as much on the bottom line as old Twitter. It implies a lot of upside if advertising really does come back.

Except… we don't really know what that $1.2 billion "adjusted EBITDA" number really means. An unnamed source with knowledge of X's finances tells the FT the number is "wildly adjusted" but doesn't elaborate; Bloomberg said the figure includes "a significant list of adjustments that help boost the numbers." Those seem like very important caveats. And without knowing what they actually are, you can't really assess how Twitter is actually doing. A Twitter rep declined to comment on the company's financials.

But we do have one more data point that helps explain why investors are willing to act as if Twitter has turned around, regardless of its P&L: Twitter owns a $6 billion stake in xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company that relies in part on data generated by Musk's Twitter/X. And investors are very excited about that company, because investors are excited about AI.

So if you can own part of one Elon Musk company that may or may not be on the turnaround, but it comes with part of another Elon Musk company that could be red-hot, then… maybe you do it?

To be sure: A stake in a privately held AI company could be worth a lot more, one day, when the AI race shakes out. Or it could be worth much less.

Along the same lines: Over the past decade or so we've seen lots of supposedly hot private tech companies get a rude reality check when public investors get a chance to assess their prospects and decide they're worth much less than their private backers thought. And the flip side of that is that people who put money into Tesla or SpaceX years ago are very, very happy with their decision.

And as I noted last summer when Twitter appeared to be at its financial nadir, lots of the people associated with Musk's Twitter deal don't really care what happens to Twitter. They simply want to be in business with Elon Musk so they can continue to be in business with Elon Musk. And as long as that's the case, it's going to be very, very hard to understand what Twitter is truly worth.