Elon Musk says Twitter is “roughly breaking even” as most of its advertisers have returned. He added that the social media’s aggressive cost-cutting efforts have started bearing fruit after massive layoffs.
The Billionaire CEO said he has been able to do this with 1,500 members of staff compared to over 8,000 employees in the company before he took over in October last year. He took over Twitter after months of drama by paying $54.20 per share, equal to about $44 billion.
He made this revelation at an interview with BBC broadcast live’s James Clayton on Twitter Spaces.
At the height of the Twitter takeover, a lot of advertisers bailed out of the platform because it apparently failed to tackle the hateful posts that resulted from the takeover. He however stated that most of them had come back. In his words, “Almost all of them… have… either come back or said they’re going to come back, there are very few exceptions.”
He also revealed that he had to buy Twitter because he knew if he didn’t, he would have been forced to, by the court. He had put up a bid for the company, he couldn’t just say he wasn’t interested after making a lot of noice about it.
He admitted that the Twitter takeover process has been marked by an “extremely high” level of pain. According to him, “It’s been really quite a stressful situation, you know, for the last several months.”
“It’s been quite painful, but I think… at the end of the day it should have been done.”
“Were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course. You know … all’s well that ends well.”
