Musk, in an interview with BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday, April 12, said Twitter has about 1,500 employees now, a sharp decline from “just under 8,000 staff members” it had before he took it over in October.
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since the $44 billion acquisition by Musk, as its layoffs have also included engineers responsible for preventing service outages, according to reports.
Last week, 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 acknowledged some glitches, including recent outages, but said they have not lasted very long.
He says Twitter was in a $3 billion negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic actions, referring to its large-scale layoffs.
“We could be cash-flow positive this quarter if things go well,” he said in the interview that attracted more than 3 million listeners.
Musk said Twitter’s massive decline in advertising since his acquisition was due to the cyclical nature of ad spending some of which was “political.” He said on Wednesday most of its advertisers have returned.
The billionaire said he has no one in mind to succeed him as Twitter chief executive despite facing scrutiny from Tesla investors about the amount of time he spends running the social media platform.
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