Elon Musk questions Twitter’s ‘monetisable’ daily active user numbers

After scrapping the $44 billion Twitter deal over the presence of fake/spam accounts, Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday questioned the company’s way of measuring its user base, which it uniquely calls “monetizable daily active users” (mDAUs).

In 2019, Twitter for the first time used the word mDAU, saying it believes that monetizable DAU, and its related growth, “are the best ways to measure our success”.

Monetizable DAU are users who log in and access Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or our Twitter applications that are able to show ads.

Twitter says that its mDAUs are not comparable to current disclosures from other companies, many of whom share a more expansive metric that includes people who are not seeing ads.