Musk says Twitter is roughly breaking even, has cut about 80% of staff

Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the social media company is “roughly breaking even” as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have started bearing fruit after huge layoffs.

Musk, in an interview with the BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, said the company has about 1,500 employees, a sharp decline from “just under 8,000 staff members” it had before he took it over in October.

Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since the $44bn (R810.5bn) acquisition by Musk, as its layoffs have 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 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 have not lasted long.

He said Twitter was in a $3bn 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 3-million listeners, adding the company has all-time high user numbers.

Twitter has been hit by a huge decline in advertising since Musk took over.

Musk had said this was due to the cyclical nature of ad spending and some of which was “political”. He said on Wednesday most of its advertisers have returned.

The billionaire, who also runs electric carmaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, said he has no-one in mind to succeed him as Twitter CEO.

Musk has faced scrutiny from Tesla investors about the amount of time he spends running the social media platform and had previously said the end of this year would be “good timing” to find a new Twitter CEO.

Reuters