Musk claims Twitter is roughly breaking even, advertisers are returning

In one of many largest interviews since he purchased Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk stated that the micro-blogging website is “roughly breaking even” and that many of the advertisers who had jumped ship have returned.

Throughout a stay interview with the BBC on Wednesday (which was recorded on Twitter Areas), Musk dismissed issues about rise in hate speech and misinformation, that skyrocketed on the social media platform through the early months of his new regime. When requested concerning the rising quantity of hate speech on the platform, the Twitter CEO requested the BBC journalist for an instance earlier than saying, “You’ll be able to’t even identify a single one…you simply lied.” The interview has greater than 3 million listeners up to now.

And when confronted on the difficulty of the unfold of misinformation on COVID-19, Musk accused the BBC of spreading misinformation about masking and vaccination, including that “Covid is not a difficulty.” Considerations concerning the rise of hate speech and misinformation on Twitter had skyrocketed after Musk revamped Twitter Blue – the platform’s subscription service – to let anybody who’s prepared to pay a month-to-month or yearly price get the coveted “Blue Tick” checkmark. This resulted in a rise of verified accounts on Twitter, which made it tough and nigh-impossible to determine if the posts produced from the accounts have been from legit customers or not.

Within the interview, Musk went on so as to add that the aggressive cost-cutting efforts that he had undertaken over the previous few months had began bearing fruit. It is a pity because it got here at the price of the roles of quite a few workers on the social media firm (together with many engineers answerable for fixing and stopping service outages. The shortage of engineers has resulted in Twitter dealing with a number of glitches and bugs this yr). When Musk had taken over the reins in October, Twitter had just below 8000 workers members. Practically six months down the road, the social media firm is limping ahead with a skeleton crew of round 1500 workers, owing to the truth that Twitter resorted to huge layoffs through the previous months as a part of its cost-cutting efforts.

“We might be cash-flow optimistic this quarter if issues go nicely,” Musk stated within the interview, including the corporate at the moment has all-time excessive person numbers. Moreover, he added that the platform was in a $3 billion damaging money circulation scenario and thus, he needed to take drastic actions. Musk’s antics had pushed quite a few advertisers from the platform, who feared that their adverts would present up throughout malicious or inappropriate content material. Now, Musk claims that many of the advertisers have returned to the platform and that the large decline in promoting because the acquisition was as a result of cyclical nature of advert spending, a few of which was “political.”

“Virtually all of them… have… both come again or stated they’re going to come back again, there are only a few exceptions,” Musk stated, including, “I truly don’t know of anybody who stated definitively they’re not coming again. They’re all type of trending to coming again. ‘Hey, bounce in, the water is heat, it’s nice.’”