Twitter breaking even, staff down to 1,500, Musk says
Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk said yesterday that the social media company was “roughly breaking even” as most of its advertisers had returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts had started bearing fruit after massive layoffs.
Musk, in an interview with the BBC, broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, said Twitter now had about 1,500 employees, a sharp decline from “just under 8,000 staff members” it had before he took it over in October last year.
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since the $44bn (R811bn) acquisition by Musk, as its layoffs also included many engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.
Last week, Twitter suffered a bug that prevented thousands of users from accessing links, its sixth major outage since the beginning of the year, according to internet watchdog group NetBlocks.
Musk acknowledged some glitches, including recent outages, but said they had not lasted very long. He said Twitter was in a $3bn (R55bn) negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic action, referring to its large-scale layoffs.
“We could be cash-flow positive this quarter if things go well,” he said in the interview that attracted more than threemillion listeners, adding that the company currently had alltime-high user numbers.
Twitter has been hit by a massive decline in advertising since his acquisition.
Musk had said this was due to the cyclical nature of ad spending and some of which was political.
He said yesterday most of its advertisers had returned.
The billionaire, who also runs electronic car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, said he had no-one in mind to succeed him as Twitter CEO.
Musk has faced scrutiny from Tesla investors about the time he spends running the social media platform and previously said the end of this year would be good timing to find a new Twitter CEO.