The high-debt buyout of Twitter by tech tycoon Elon Musk for $44 billion took place more than four months ago. Since then, Twitter’s ad income has fallen by as much as 50%, according to Musk. But some significant marketers are still running ads on Twitter. Musk acknowledged and praised Disney and Apple on Tuesday at the 2023 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in San Francisco. He claims that they are two of Twitter’s top advertisers.
A bleak picture of Twitter’s financial condition was also revealed by Musk. He claims that due to declining ad income and the need to pay off more debt, the company could have filed for bankruptcy in less than four months. Musk said that “immediate and drastic action” was needed.
In order to cut costs linked to cloud computing, the company not only dropped the number of Twitter workers from 7,500 to under 2,000 (a decrease of more than 70%), but it also reduced the number of its data centers from three to two. Overall, Twitter has “the fastest product evolution in Twitter’s history” and has decreased its annualized deficit from $4.5 billion to about $1.5 billion (excluding a $1.5 billion loan payment).
There have been some hiccups, but that is to be expected, said Musk. “We now have the chance to make Twitter into something truly extraordinary. I don’t want to set a flag for myself, but I think we have potentially positive cash flow in the second quarter,” he adds.
Elon Musk believes Twitter will improve
According to Musk, Twitter has a lot of space for growth in terms of making money from users’ time spent on the site. He asserts that every day, 130 million hours of “the smartest people on the planet” are spent on Twitter. However, he reveals that only 5 to 6% of ad income is presently generated from those hours.
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Musk said his goal with Twitter is to be the most timely and accurate source of truth, “no matter how unpleasant it may be”. A self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” – who has reinstated numerous accounts banned for violating Twitter policies, including Donald Trump – Musk reiterated his belief that Twitter is a guarantee of free speech. “I fear for the future of our civilization if we don’t have a solid foundation of free speech,” he said.
Today, “the media controls the narrative,” he said, whereas on Twitter, “the public can control the narrative. That’s a pretty remarkable thing,” describing the social network as a forum for “citizen journalists.”
On Monday, Twitter faced a major technical issue that caused issues when users clicked on links to external websites.”What was supposed to be a small change for 1% of Twitter’s user base turned out to be catastrophic for 100% of Twitter’s user base,” Musk said, summarizing the bug.
About Twitter
Twitter is a social media platform where users can post and interact with short messages called “tweets”. Tweets are limited to 280 characters and can include text, photos, videos, and links. Users can follow other accounts and see their tweets in their feeds. Twitter also allows users to search for and participate in conversations around specific topics using hashtags. It has become a popular platform for breaking news, public discourse, and celebrity communication. Twitter was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Twitter allows users to engage in various activities. This include liking and retweeting other users’ tweets, replying to tweets, and direct messaging other users. Users can also create and participate in Twitter chats. These are are live conversations around a specific topic that takes place at a designated time using a designated hashtag.
Twitter chose a number of means to tackle issues of hate speech and abuse. This is after it received criticism for how it handles these issues. This is one of the reasons Elon Musk bought the company, to better “handle these issues”.
