Elon Musk said the last three months were “extremely tough” as he scrambled to “save Twitter from bankruptcy” while also running his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
The billionaire’s frank admission followed his past warnings about dire financial conditions at Twitter since he purchased the struggling social media platform for $44 billion last October.
“Wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone,” Musk tweeted Sunday regarding the difficult stretch.
“Twitter still has challenges, but is now trending to breakeven if we keep at it. Public support is much appreciated!” he added.
Musk tempered his optimistic forecast in a separate tweet, noting that Twitter is still “definitely not financially healthy yet” but was “trending to be so” in the future.
“Lots of work still needed to get there,” he said.
Twitter’s daily revenue plunged 40% last month compared to January 2022 as the many of the company’s top advertisers stopped or pulled back on spending, according to tech news site Platformer. There have been estimates that Twitter’s ad revenue declined by as much as 70% last December, year-over-year, Reuters reported.
In a meeting last November, Musk warned Twitter staffers that the company could declare bankruptcy if it could not fix a revenue shortfall. That same month, Musk said Twitter was losing $4 million per day after an exodus of major advertisers caused a “massive drop in revenue.”
Twitter has since rolled out a revamped version of its “Blue” subscription service, under which users can pay $8 per month for account verification and other perks, in a bid to boost revenue.
