Musk says Twitter is breaking even at 1,500 employees

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said that the company is “roughly breaking even” on the finance side, as most of its advertisers have come back and its cost-cutting efforts are working.

In an interview with BBC broadest on Twitter Spaces, he announced that Twitter is now running on 1,500 employers from 8,000 before.

Twitter’s Finance

The company also laid off a bunch of engineers who were previously responsible for fixing and preventing service outages. Last week the company had its sixth major outage since the beginning of the year. Musk said that the glitches and outages were temporary. He also said that Twitter had been in a $3 billion negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic action thus the layoffs.

“We could be cash flow positive this quarter if things go well,” said Musk. The interview attracted more than three million listeners. Twitter has been hit by a massive decline in advertising since his acquisition.

Musk attributed this to the cyclical nature of ad spend. Defending the layoffs he said that it was not an easy decision to make nor did he tell everyone individually. “It’s not possible to talk with that many people face to face. The issue is like the company’s going to go bankrupt if we do not cut costs immediately. This is not a caring, uncaring situation. It’s like if the whole ship sinks the nobody’s got a job. What would you do? If you’ve four months to live, a 120 days, in a hundred and 20 days you’re dead, so what do you want to do?”

Advertisers Are Back

On the finance side, Musk also said that most of Twitters advertisers had come back. “You can see (the increased advertising) for yourself on Twitter,” said Musk.

“I think almost all of them (who left) have either come back or said they were going to come back. There’s very few exceptions. ‘Depending on how things go, if current trends continue, we could be … cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well.’”

Although Musk has said that Twitter should have a new CEO by the end of this year he has no one in mind to succeed him.

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