Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter Inc, stated on Wednesday that the social media company is “roughly breaking even,” as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have begun to bear fruit following massive layoffs.
Musk said in an interview with BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces that Twitter now has about 1,500 employees, down from “just under 8,000” before he took over in October.
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, with many engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages laid off, according to sources.
According to internet watchdog group NetBlocks, Twitter experienced its sixth major outage since the beginning of the year last week when a bug prevented thousands of users from accessing links.
Musk acknowledged some glitches, including recent outages, but claimed they were brief.
He claims Twitter was in a $3 billion negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic measures, such as mass layoffs.
“We could be cash-flow positive this quarter if things go well,” he said in the interview, which drew over 3 million listeners, adding that the company is currently at an all-time high in terms of user numbers.
Since its acquisition, Twitter has seen a significant drop in advertising revenue.
Musk explained that this was due to the cyclical nature of advertising spending, some of which was “political.” On Wednesday, he stated that the majority of its advertisers had returned.
The billionaire, who also owns Tesla (TSLA.O) and SpaceX, has stated that he has no plans to appoint someone to succeed him as Twitter CEO.
Musk has come under fire from Tesla shareholders for the amount of time he spends running the social media platform, and he previously stated that finding a new Twitter CEO would be “good timing” at the end of this year.
