Linda Yaccarino follows up her car-crash interview by pretending everything's just fine at X

• It's been a year since Elon Musk bought X, formerly known as Twitter.
• The platform has struggled to avoid controversy and maintain its ad business.

It's been a wild year for X.

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to buy the platform, which was then known as Twitter.

In the first few months under new leadership, the company had lost more than half of its staff and was embroiled in several public controversies.

Lawsuits continued to stack up throughout the year and advertisers fled the scandal-ridden platform — some of which never returned. User numbers are reportedly down, regulators are probing the platform over disinformation, and competitors have popped up around every corner.

X's CEO Linda Yaccarino also made headlines in September after giving a car-crash interview, where she seemed not to have a grasp on precise user numbers and couldn't answer questions about a paywall.

But if we are to believe her most recent claims, shared in a blog post on Thursday, the "future is bright" for the platform.

The post talked up some of the company's achievements over the year and praised "the work our team has been doing to accelerate the future of X."

Some of these achievements, however, fail to match up with wider reports.

Yaccarino highlighted advertisers in her post, saying that in the last quarter, more than "1,700 advertisers returned to X, from small businesses to major brands — including 90 of the top 100 ad spenders from a year ago."

However, data from marketing consultancy Ebiquity, which was shared with Insider, suggested that most big advertisers have stopped spending on X. The company works with 70 of the top 100 advertisers, only 2 of which advertised on X last month, the data found.

Yaccarino also flagged the platform's user numbers as a point of success, pointing to new signups and time spent on the platform as potential indicators.

Reporting from The Wall Street Journal, based on third-party data, suggested X was actually struggling on several key metrics.

An analysis by research firm Sensor Tower was cited by the Journal. It found that X's daily active users via mobile apps dropped by 16% in September when compared to October 2022.

The company's sudden rebrand to X in July also tanked app downloads, the Journal reported. The platform, however, has seen an overall quarterly increase in global app downloads since Musk's acquisition, the report said.

Representatives for X and Yaccarino did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.