Elon Musk says Twitter continues to lose money because advertising has been cut in half.
In response to a tweet offering business advice, Musk tweeted on Saturday: “We are still in negative cash flow, due to (about) a 50% drop in ad revenue plus a large debt load.”
“We need to get cash flow positive before we can afford anything else,” he concluded.
Since the took over Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, Musk has tried to reassure advertisers who were concerned about the removal of top executives, widespread layoffs, and a different approach to content moderation. Some high-profile users who had been banned were allowed to back on site.
In April, Musk said that most of the advertisers who left had returned and that the company could be cash flow positive in the second quarter.
In May, it hired a new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal executive with strong ties to the advertising industry.
But since then, Twitter has annoyed some users by imposing new limits about how many tweets they can see in a day, and some users complained that they couldn’t access the site. Musk said the restrictions were necessary to prevent scraping potentially valuable data.
Twitter got a new competitor this month when Facebook owner Meta launched a text-focused app, Threads, and won tens of millions of records in a few days. Twitter responded by threat of legal action.
