Musk says that Twitter is roughly balanced, has 1,500 employees
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April 12 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the social media company is “about breaking even” as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have begun to bear fruit after massive layoffs.
Musk, in an interview with the BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, said Twitter has about 1[ads1],500 employees now, down sharply from “just under 8,000 employees” it had before he took it over in October.
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, as the 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 from accessing links, the sixth major outbreak since the beginning of the year, according to the web watchdog group NetBlocks.
Musk acknowledged some glitches, including recent outages, but said they haven’t lasted very long.
He says Twitter was in a $3 billion negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic action, citing large-scale layoffs.
“We could be cash-flow positive this quarter if things go well,” he said in the interview, which attracted more than 3 million listeners, adding that the company currently has high user numbers.
Twitter has been hit by a massive decline in advertising since the acquisition.
Musk had said it was because of the cyclical nature of ad spend, some of which was “political”. He said on Wednesday that most of the advertisers have returned.
The billionaire, who also runs electronic car maker Tesla ( TSLA.O ) and rocket company SpaceX, said he has no one in mind to succeed him as Twitter chief.
Musk has faced scrutiny from Tesla investors over the length of time he is spending running the social media platform and had previously said the end of this year would be “good timing” to find a new Twitter chief.
Reporting by Akriti Sharma; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Christian Schmollinger
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