Twitter, in Musk fight, posts surprising quarterly drop in revenue

LONDON » Twitter reported a quarterly loss Friday and declining revenue caught Wall Street off guard with the number of people using the platform on the rise.

The latest quarterly earnings figures offered a glimpse into how the social media platform has performed during a monthslong negotiation with billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk after he said that he would buy the company, and then changed his mind.

It was worse than industry analysts had anticipated.

The company lost $270 million in the April-june period, or 8 cents per share. Wall Street was expecting a per-share profit of 14 cents, according to a poll by Factset.

Inflation has crimped advertising spending and that was a huge drag on Twitter’s quarterly revenue, which slid 1% to $1.18 billion. The company also cited “uncertainty” over the acquisition by Musk.

Twitter is holding no calls with analysts and will not publish a letter to shareholders, as is the norm, because of the pending acquisition.

The underlying numbers at Twitter, however, were good. The number of daily active users rose 16.6% to 237.8 million compared with the same period a year before.

Those numbers are particularly impressive in the wake of a quarterly earnings report late Thursday from the social media company Snap.

Snap also saw advertising tumble in the high-inflationary environment and shares plunged more than 30% Friday before the opening bell.

“When compared to the nightmare quarter of SNAP last night, it shows digital ad spending is not falling off a cliff like feared which is a positive for others in the space such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Google,” wrote Dan Ives, who covers technology for Wedbush.

Shares of Twitter Inc. rose 1% at the opening bell Friday as the clash with Musk overshadowed almost everything.