Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed that the social media giant has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since last October when Musk became its new owner. He said Twitter’s sale did not increase on expected scale in June but July was a “bit more promising”.
150 million are using Threads, a rival app of Twitter, according to some estimates. A potential two billion people are instantaneously accessible to the Meta-designed platform thanks to its built-in connection to Instagram.
A huge debt is mounted on twitter and has negative cash flow, said Musk. Twitter’s ad revenue came down by 50%. He tweeted, “Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”
Musk claimed that Twitter was on schedule to report $3bn in revenue in 2023, down from $5.1bn in 2021, after firing thousands of staff and reducing cloud service costs. When he took control in 2022, Musk fired almost half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees in an effort to reduce costs.
Meghana Dhar opined that Twitter’s days of struggle are older than Musk’s ownership. Dhar is the former head of partnerships at Snap and Meta. She said, “Elon and Twitter are in a candidly tough position right now. To be fair to Elon though, we’ve seen that decline in Twitter revenue and growth in revenue since pre-Elon – there’s been kind of a steady decline.”
JM Finn’s investment director Lucy Coutts said: “You wouldn’t bet against him, he’s a kind of mercurial figure and I think probably he will turn it around but it is just going to take longer. But unfortunately he has got $13bn of debt to pay by the end of July so we may see more pressure on the shares in Tesla if he has to sell more of his stake in that company.”
