After the waves of layoffs under the new owner Elon Musk, Twitter only has around 1,500 employees after almost 8,000 previously. Musk gave the numbers in an interview with the British broadcaster BBC. Shortly after taking over the online service for around 44 billion dollars last October, the tech billionaire had the number of employees roughly halved in a first step. It was “painful” to lay off so many people, but without radical austerity measures, Twitter only had “four months to live,” Musk said.
Before the acquisition, Twitter made almost all of its business from advertising revenue – for example, when companies pay to have their tweets appear in users’ news feeds. Musk’s purchase was followed by a churn of advertisers who feared a negative environment for their tweets under the controversial entrepreneur. Sales have halved, as Musk admitted at the time. At the same time, Twitter has to make interest payments on around twelve billion dollars in loans for the takeover.
Musk now said in the BBC interview that advertisers have returned or are planning to. There are more ads again and Twitter only has minimal losses, he added, without naming numbers. Since the company is no longer listed on the stock exchange, it no longer has to publish quarterly reports.
After the purchase announcement in spring 2022, Musk tried to get out of the deal relatively quickly. He referred to an allegedly high number of automated bot accounts, which means that the price he proposed is no longer justified. The $44 billion was a hefty premium to Twitter’s stock market value at the time. The Twitter management, which initially resisted the takeover attempt but was committed to the interests of shareholders after the agreement with Musk, dragged him to court. Asked if he ended up making the Twitter purchase because a judge would have forced him to do it anyway, Musk said in the BBC interview, “Yes, that’s why.”
