Nearly ten months after billionaire business magnate Elon Musk took over Twitter, the financial health of the microblogging platform is yet to see a sight of improvement. Musk on Saturday said that Twitter’s cash flow is still negative and that there has been a nearly 50 per cent drop in the advertising revenue of the social media platform. Twitter also continues to have its infamous legacy of heavy debt load, an aspect Musk inherited from Jack Dorsey’s executive leadership.
“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk said in a tweet early on Saturday.
After Musk acquired Twitter in October, the platform has been gripped by massive chaos. From layoffs of thousands of employees to lax content moderation, Musk’s Twitter has been swarmed by a number of issues and conflicts that have repelled away many advertisers.
A ‘tanking’ active user base: What all Twitter is facing amid threat of rout from Zuckerberg’s Threads
According to the chief of internet services company Cloudflare, Twitter’s website traffic is tanking and there have been signs that the users are migrating to alternative platforms such as Threads, BlueSky and Mastodon.
In early July, Twitter started forcing internet surfers to log in to view tweets. Musk also set a rate limit for the number of tweets different Twitter accounts could read each day: initially 6,000 for paying users and 600 for non-paying users. Musk said the changes were introduced to curb attempts to scrape the website.
The limit has since been increased. Twitter also removed the requirement of logging in to view the tweets last week.
Meanwhile, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg launched its answer to Twitter, the Threads platform, saying: “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success.”
“That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
How do Twitter’s finances look right now?
Not quite bright and definitely not alright.
Also watch | Explained: The future of Twitter under Elon Musk
After cutting cloud service bills, Musk had said that Twitter reduced its non-debt expenditures to $1.5 billion from a projected $4.5 billion in 2023.
But annually, Twitter is supposed to pay $1.5 billion in payments due to debt it took on a $44 billion deal in October 2023.
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