A Twitter logo hangs outside the company’s offices in San Francisco, California on December 19, 2022.Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that the social media company was “roughly breaking even” as most of its advertisers returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts began to bear fruit. fruits after massive layoffs.
Musk, in an interview with the BBC livestreamed on Twitter Spaces, said Twitter currently has around 1,500 employees, a sharp drop from “just under 8,000 staff” before he took it over. in October.
Twitter has been marred by chaos and uncertainty since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, as its layoffs also included numerous engineers tasked with fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.
Last week, Twitter suffered a bug that left thousands of users unable to access links, its sixth major outage since the start of the year, according to internet monitoring group NetBlocks.
Musk acknowledged some issues, including recent outages, but said they didn’t last very long.
He says Twitter was in a negative $3 billion cash position and had to take drastic action, referring to its large-scale layoffs.
“We could be cash flow positive this quarter if all goes well,” he said in the interview which drew more than 3 million listeners, adding that the company currently has a number of users record.
Twitter has been hit by a massive drop in advertising since its acquisition.
Musk had said this was due to the cyclical nature of ad spending, and some of it was “political.” It said Wednesday that most of its advertisers were back.
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’s chief executive.
Musk has come under intense scrutiny from Tesla investors over his time managing the social media platform and previously said the end of this year would be “a good time”. to find a new Twitter CEO.