CNN —
Elon Musk on Tuesday offered an optimistic picture of how Twitter can improve the advertising business he’s helped derail and boost bottom line, while admitting that after several rounds of layoffs, getting the social network up and running is proving challenging hold.
Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, Musk laid out his vision to boost Twitter’s core advertising business by employing the standard strategy of most of the company’s competitors: improving the relevance of the ads it runs.
“The advertising relevance is the biggest thing,” Musk said. “And now this is going to sound totally bizarre, but Twitter didn’t take advertising relevance into account until three months ago.”
With this change and major cost cuts across the company, Musk believes Twitter has “gained a chance to be cash flow positive in the next quarter.”
“In the future, Twitter will have very relevant and useful advertising,” Musk said. “And because it’s useful, because it’s relevant, there’s going to be a massive increase in sales because it’s useful now. So I’m very optimistic about the future. It’s been a very difficult four months, but I’m optimistic about the future.”
Since acquiring the platform in late October, Twitter has seen a mass exodus of top brands as Musk relaxed some content moderation policies, restored inflammatory accounts and made a series of erratic remarks on politics and world affairs. Musk, who has previously tweeted about his hatred of advertising, was quick to bet on bolstering a paid subscription offering instead, but it’s reportedly struggled to gain traction.
He also took the time to thank advertisers who have stayed loyal to Twitter during its bumpy takeover, including Disney and Apple.
But even as Musk tries to grow Twitter’s ads business, which has long provided nearly all of the company’s revenue, there are serious doubts about the platform’s ability to stay online.
Twitter has been inundated with outages, including a significant service disruption on Monday, and other user headaches since Musk took over, likely related to the multiple rounds of mass layoffs that have taken place under his watch. On Tuesday, he blamed the “overly complex” underlying technology for some of the recent service disruptions.
“The codebase is like a Rube Goldberg machine, and if you scale up part of the Rube Goldberg machine, there’s another Rube Goldberg machine, and then there’s another one,” Musk said at Tuesday’s event . “So it’s quite difficult to keep the thing going, and then difficult to continue developing the product because it’s really overly complex to say the least.”
“We’re going to make a change that looks like a small change somewhere, which then causes a massive disruption,” he said. Musk said Monday’s outage was the result of “a small change in 1% of Twitter’s user base.” [that] was a catastrophic change for 100% of Twitter’s user base.”
At the same time, Musk continues to make controversial remarks that could discourage brands from returning to the platform or increasing their spending on the platform. Musk has been criticized by some this week after publicly poking fun at a Twitter employee with a disability who asked the Twitter owner if he had been fired.
At Tuesday’s event, Musk defected to a number of independent sites, including repeated attacks on legacy media organizations. “What I would say to advertisers and brands is, you know, use Twitter yourself and believe what you see on Twitter, not what you read in the papers,” Musk said. “Because what you see on Twitter is real and what you read in newspapers is not.”