New York CNN –
Elon Musk announced on Twitter on Saturday that the platform is still cash flow negative due to a 50% drop in ad revenue and a “heavy debt load.”
The billionaire owner tweeted on Saturdayin response to one follower’s business advice: “We need to be cash flow positive before we can afford the luxury of anything else.”
The tweet is in stark contrast to his tone in April, when Musk told the BBC that the platform is now “about breaking even” and that most of its advertisers have returned.
Ad revenue was a contentious issue and an uphill battle for the site after hordes of advertisers fled following Musk’s takeover. Advertisers were concerned about content moderation, mass layoffs and general uncertainty about Twitter’s future.
Linda Yaccarino, a former head of marketing at NBCUniversal, recently took over the CEO position from Musk — he’s likely looking to her advertising experience to bring her back.
The New York Times, citing an internal presentation, reported that Twitter’s US ad revenue fell 59% year over year in the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May. (CNN didn’t see the presentation.)
Just 43% of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September, the month before Musk’s acquisition, were still advertising on the platform in April, according to data market research firm Sensor Tower provided to CNN last month.
“It was definitely extremely difficult,” Musk said last month at the Twitter Spaces livestream event Musk hosted with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Basically, our revenue is cut in half because we didn’t play by the rules.” He added that it’s been “a big fight for Twitter to break even.”
And with rival app Meta’s Threads surpassing 100 million downloads less than a week after launch, Twitter is under increasing pressure.
Musk has added a variety of cost-cutting or non-cash measures to the site, from giving blue ticks on a Twitter Blue membership to putting a paywall on Tweetdeck.
On Thursday, announced on Twitter Content creators could get a share of the site’s advertising revenue, which would appear to encourage more creators to join the site. To be eligible, creators must be on Twitter Blue and have had at least 5 million impressions for their posts in the past three months.
YouTubers now making money through Twitter include Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed “misogynistic” online influencer accused in Romania of human trafficking, rape and creating a criminal gang.
CNN received no comment from Twitter.