Elon Musk says Twitter is losing money because of advertisers leaving the platform.
Advertisements on Twitter have dropped by half since Musk took over the social media platform. In reply to a tweet offering business ideas, Musk said: “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load. Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last fall and since then, he tried -unsuccessfully- to keep advertisers on the platform, who were concerned about the ouster of top executives, layoffs, and content moderation.
The billionaire also implemented new restrictions, as limits on how many tweets users can view per day. Musk said the measurement was to prevent unauthorized scraping of potential data.
In April, Musk said most of the advertisers that left had returned to the platform and that the company might become cash-flow positive in the second quarter.
In May, he hired Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO, an NBCUniversal executive with ties in the advertising industry.
In the past weeks, Meta launched “Threads” the new Twitter competitor and gained tens of millions of users in a few days – Twitter responded by threatening legal action.