Photo: AFP/ SCANPIX/ LETA
Twitter had “four months to live” before mass layoffs, Twitter owner Elon Musk told the BBC on Wednesday.
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Musk confirmed that around 80% of the workforce has been laid off since he took over the company, but insisted that cost-cutting was necessary to save Twitter from bankruptcy.
In an interview at the BBC’s Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Musk said the social media platform was “spending money like it was going out of style” before he took over the company.
“There is a problem – the company is going to go bankrupt if we do not reduce costs immediately. In this situation, it is not a question of caring or not caring [par darbiniekiem]. If the whole ship goes down, there’s no work for anyone,” Musk said.
He admitted that it was in a “negative cash flow situation” of $3 billion after taking over the company, and that Twitter had “four months to live.”
Since Musk bought Twitter last October for $44 billion, thousands of employees have been laid off. It now has about 1,500 employees, down from just under eight thousand at the time of the takeover, Musk confirmed.
Musk had been criticized for halving the number of full-time employees at the company within a week, ending remote work and ultimately demanding that the remaining employees agree to longer and more intensive work.
His move also raised concerns about whether the social media platform can survive with a reduced maintenance team and available engineers.
Musk admitted on Wednesday that the shutdown of one of Twitter’s service centers turned out to be “pretty catastrophic” because the platform lost much of its functionality as a result.
He said, however, that Twitter’s profits and expenses are now about the same and the company could soon become profitable again.
“If the current trend continues, then I think we can be profitable this quarter – more precisely, with a positive cash flow. (..) I think almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back. There are very few exceptions,” Musk said.
After Musk took over Twitter, many advertisers stopped working with the platform, concerned about Musk’s approach to content and its moderation.
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