Musk: Twitter 'Roughly Breaking Even'

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Facts

  • In an interview with BBC broadcast live on Wednesday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk addressed several topics surrounding the company since his $44B purchase of the platform, including revealing that Twitter is “roughly breaking even.”1
  • Musk, who Forbes estimates is worth $189.1B, also acknowledged he decided to forgo legal action and, instead, complete his purchase of Twitter late last year because he felt he would’ve lost his case.2
  • Twitter under Musk has also slashed almost 8K jobs from its workforce, bringing its total remaining staff to about 1.5K, with Musk saying the workload associated with running the platform has led him to “sometimes sleep in the office.”3
  • According to the billionaire, without the job cuts and other “drastic action,” Twitter would’ve been out of business within four months because of a negative cash flow situation.4
  • Since Musk purchased Twitter, it has faced several challenges, including six major outages since the beginning of the year, and a decrease in advertising revenue.1
  • The interview with the UK-based network came after it had objected to being labeled a 'government funded media.' Following the interview — which also discussed disinformation, hate speech, and advertising, among others — Musk changed its status to 'publicly funded.'5

Sources: 1Reuters, 2Forbes, 3The hill, 4CNN and 5BBC News.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by Quartz. Musk can sugarcoat it all he wants, but Twitter is an ad-reliant platform and ad sales are projected to drop by around 28% this year over last. And the number one problem is Musk: Advertisers can’t trust him, especially since he’s rolled back rules related to objectionable content and revamped the verification system. For Twitter to survive, it will have to do better than break even, and that’ll only happen when the platform is separated from Musk’s personal brand.
  • Narrative B, as provided by Marketwatch. Saving Twitter wasn't an easy task, but it looks like the worst is behind Musk and the platform. Twitter now has a sleeker workforce, a subscription model that’ll help offset advertising losses, and many advertisers are returning after waiting to see what Musk would do with the company. In a matter of months, Twitter could be in the black.

Predictions