Musk says harsh cost cuts saved Twitter

Elon Musk He said on Wednesday that severe cost cuts at Twitter have repaired the company’s dire financials as it searches for a replacement as the head of the social network.

In a live chat forum, the mogul said that without the changes, including the layoff of more than half of Twitter’s employees, the company would have lost $3 billion a year.

“Not good since Twitter has $1 billion in cash. That’s why I’ve spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he said on Twitter Spaces, a feature of the platform he bought for $44 billion.

Yeah…you’re looking at it from my point of view…basically, you’re in a plane heading towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls not working,” he said.

As soon as he became owner of Twitter, Musk laid off about half of his 7,500-person workforce, raising concerns that the company was understaffed to handle content moderation duties. Questions were also raised from governments and advertisers.

Musk said his strategy was paying off, and by slashing costs and increasing subscriber revenue, he now believed “Twitter will be fine next year” and break even.

The head of Tesla y SpaceX He added that he understood advertisers being afraid to spend on his platform, but blamed their caution on poor economic prospects, not concerns about content moderation.

He said the new $8 a month subscription service for verifying the identities of account holders, called Twitter Blue, would help make up the difference.

“Otherwise, how will we pay the server bill?” Musk questioned, adding that Twitter’s hardware costs about $1.5 billion a year.

Musk came to the defense of his policies after he tweeted that he was looking for a new CEO “dumb” enough to replace him.

He said he would then limit his duties to running the software and server teams at Twitter.

This came after Musk asked in a Twitter poll if he should stay on as CEO of the company: 57% of users voted that he should resign.

It is not the first time that Musk has used Twitter polls to make decisions on the platform, he has already done so, for example, with the restoration of the former US president’s account. Donald Trump.