Since the social media platform has been aggressively cutting costs, Twitter CEO Elon Musk stated on Tuesday that the company had “a shot” at being cash flow positive in the following quarter.
Musk said during a webcast Morgan Stanley investor conference that it was “startling” how little money Twitter made from its messaging service.
According to Musk, the company has reduced its non-debt expenses to $1.5 billion from $4.5 billion in 2023, helped by a 40% reduction in the cost of cloud services and the closure of one data center. Additionally, Twitter has laid off thousands of workers.
In October, Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla, purchased Twitter for $44 billion. As a result of the debt it took on in the take-private deal, the company also has to pay about $1.5 billion in interest each year, Musk stated.
He went on to say that Twitter has experienced a “massive decline in advertising,” some of which he attributed to the cyclical nature of advertising spending and others to “political” factors.
Since Musk bought Twitter, there has been chaos and uncertainty. According to the internet watchdog organization NetBlocks, it experienced its sixth major outage since the beginning of the year on Monday when a bug prevented thousands of users from accessing links.
Musk said
Monday’s outage was a “catastrophic” change for everyone, despite the fact that it was only intended to affect 1% of users. He went on to say that engineers were “cleaning up” the Twitter software code in general a lot.
Since the Musk deal, many people have been worried about Twitter’s stability. According to sources many engineers who were in charge of repairing and preventing service outages were among the mass exodus.
The billionaire predicted that assembling a Twitter management team would take some time. Musk had previously stated that the end of this year would be “good timing” to find a new chief executive to run Twitter. Tesla investors have questioned Musk’s commitment to running the social media platform.
He also stated that he anticipates that users will eventually be able to send money to one another with a single click and reiterated his plans to implement payments on Twitter.
He asserted, “I believe it is possible to become the largest financial institution in the world.”
advertisements
Making advertisements more pertinent on the stage is one more clarity of mind for the organization, he said. Due to uncertainty regarding Musk’s content moderation strategy, which he has described as “free speech absolutist,” some advertisers have left Twitter.
Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that regulators from the European Union instructed Musk to increase the number of content moderators employed by Twitter in order to comply with a forthcoming law.
Musk stated at the Morgan Stanley event on Tuesday that Democrats and Republicans now have the same level of trust in Twitter. A slide that was shown during the webcast said that the platform had 253 million daily active users who were “monetizable” in the fourth quarter.
Musk stated that users spend “130 million hours of their time per day” on Twitter, which currently earns 5 to 6 cents per hour. He stated that the business might raise it to 15 to 20 cents.