Elon Musk said on Saturday that Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion in October 2022, had lost approximately half of its advertising revenue.
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“We are still in a negative cash flow situation, due to a drop of about 50% in advertising revenues and the heavy debt burden,” the billionaire replied on Twitter to a user who made strategic suggestions. concerning the blue bird network.
“We have to get to positive cash flow before we have the luxury of doing anything else,” he added, without further elaboration.
The developments initiated by Elon Musk since his takeover of Twitter have upset network users and advertisers.
In May, Insider Intelligence claimed that Twitter was on course to earn less than $3 billion in 2023, almost a third less than in 2022.
Since then, the billionaire has made other announcements that have displeased Internet users, such as his intention in early July to restrict the reading of tweets to 10,000 per day for verified accounts, which are therefore paying, to 1,000 for others and even to 500 for new accounts.
A few days later, new announcement: the TweetDeck application, widely used by information professionals, will be reserved in the following month for certified accounts, therefore paying.
The changes come as Threads, an app launched by Facebook parent company Meta to compete with Twitter, passed the 100 million user mark just five days after its July 5 launch.
AFP
This is the first major threat to the weakened Twitter platform since its takeover by the billionaire.
The number of Threads users is still far from that of Twitter, which has between 200 and 350 million users, according to estimates. But Meta’s app can rely on synergies with popular image-sharing app Instagram, which has some 2 billion active users.
Threads’ layout looks exactly like its bluebird rival, right down to the blue mark for verified accounts. Unlike Twitter, where the only criterion for attribution of a mark is now to subscribe to a paid subscription, Threads verifies that the account is indeed that of the person whose name appears.
Elon Musk counterattacked, sending through the lawyer for Twitter’s parent company, X Corp, a letter accusing Meta of breaching trade secrets and intellectual property rights.
Facebook’s parent company, headed by Marc Zuckerberg, is notably accused of having recruited “dozens” of former Twitter employees, according to the document published by the Semafor news site.
Meta has denied the billionaire’s accusations.