Elon Musk
said that owning Twitter for the past six months has been a “roller coaster” but that his overhaul of the social-media platform could allow the company to be cash-flow positive as soon as this quarter.
In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. streamed live from Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters late Tuesday, Mr. Musk said that when he took over the company in October, it was on track to generate $3 billion in annual revenue. But it had $6 billion in annual expenses, including $1.5 billion in debt servicing.
“Twitter’s tracking to lose three billion a year, and they had one billion in the bank, so that’s four months to death,” he said. “So that’s your starting position.”
Mr. Musk quickly slashed jobs. He said Twitter now has about 1,500 employees, down from just under 8,000 when he took over. The effort to cut costs, combined with the return of many advertisers who had left Twitter, now means the company is roughly break-even, he said.
Twitter hasn’t reported its financial details publicly since going private. In December, Mr. Musk said Twitter’s workforce had dropped to a little over 2,000 employees, and that he expected the company to be roughly cash-flow break-even in 2023.
Mr. Musk called his attempt to buy Twitter a soap opera. He initially made an offer for Twitter, and then changed his mind, he said, because he thought the company didn’t accurately count the number of its users. He said he ultimately went through with the deal because he thought a court would eventually force him to do so. He sold some of his shares of
Tesla Inc.,
his electric-vehicle company, to help finance his $44-billion deal for Twitter, which closed in October.
One of Mr. Musk’s early moves was to reinstate the account of former President
Donald Trump,
who has yet to tweet since that happened. “I haven’t spoken to him,” Mr. Musk said. “He may or may not come back. The point is Twitter should be a town square that gives equal voice to the whole country and ideally the whole world.”
Mr. Musk also addressed complaints from BBC and National Public Radio staffers, who say the Twitter accounts of those organizations shouldn’t be labeled “government-funded media.” He said he would change those labels to say “publicly funded.”
Mr. Musk said he was no longer Twitter’s chief executive officer, joking that his dog, Floki, technically held that job. He said he had no one in mind to take over as Twitter boss right now.
Mr. Musk said in December that he planned to step down as CEO after a poll he initiated on the company’s future leadership ended up calling for him to hand over the top job.
Asked in the BBC interview about whether he would support the U.S. government’s efforts to ban Chinese-owned rival TikTok, Mr. Musk paused. “It would help Twitter, I suppose, if TikTok was banned, because then people would spend more time on Twitter and less time on TikTok,” he said. “But even if it were to help Twitter, I would be generally against the banning of things.”
Write to Stu Woo at [email protected]
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