Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter Inc., said on Wednesday that the social media business is “roughly breaking even,” noting that the majority of its advertisers have returned and that its aggressive cost-cutting measures have begun to pay off after significant layoffs.
In an interview with the BBC that was live-streamed on Twitter Spaces, Musk said that the social media platform currently has roughly 1,500 workers, a significant decrease from the “just under 8,000 staff members” it had prior to his acquisition of the company in October.
Since Musk paid $44 billion to acquire the social media platform, it has been characterised by instability and uncertainty, and many of the engineers who are in charge of resolving and avoiding service interruptions have been let off.
According to internet monitoring organisation NetBlocks, Twitter had its sixth significant outage since the start of the year last week when a problem blocked thousands of users from accessing links.
Musk recognised certain issues, such as recent outages, but said they were short-lived.
He claims that Twitter had to take extraordinary measures due to a $3 billion negative cash flow crisis, which included mass layoffs.
In the interview, which garnered more than 3 million listeners, he added, “We could be cash-flow positive this quarter if things go well,” adding that the firm is now seeing all-time high user numbers.
Since his takeover, Twitter has seen a sharp fall in advertising.
That was attributed, according to Musk, to the cyclical nature of advertising spending, some of which was “political.” The majority of its sponsors, he said on Wednesday, have come back.
The entrepreneur, who also owns rocket manufacturer SpaceX and electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA.O), said he had no one in mind to follow him as Twitter CEO.
Tesla shareholders have questioned Musk about how much time he spends managing the social media site, and he has said that finding a new Twitter CEO would be “good timing” towards the end of this year.
