(Reuters) -Twitter Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the company had “a shot” at being cash flow-positive next quarter, as costs have been cut and users have risen.
Musk, who was speaking at an investor conference that was webcast, said it was “startling” how poorly Twitter managed to make money off its messaging service.
The company has cut costs sharply, including layoffs, under Musk, who offered the cash flow-positive target as he described efforts to cut expenditures, or cash burn.
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since the billionaire, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc , acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October. On Monday, Twitter suffered a bug that prevented thousands of users from accessing links, its sixth major outage since the beginning of the year, according to internet watchdog group NetBlocks.
Musk said in reference to Monday’s outage that what had been intended as a small change to 1% of users ended up being a “catastrophic” change for all. He added that engineers in general were doing a lot of “clean up” of the Twitter software code.
Concerns over Twitter’s stability have been widespread since the takeover by Musk. Among the mass exodus were many engineers who were responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.
Some advertisers also have fled Twitter due to the uncertainty over how Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” would approach content moderation.
On Tuesday he said that Democrats and Republicans now trust Twitter to the same degree. The platform had 253 million daily active users that were “monetizable.”
Ad spending by Twitter’s top 30 advertisers fell 42% in November and December combined, according to estimates from Pathmatics by Sensor Tower.
(Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Peter Henderson and Matthew Lewis)
