Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the social media company is "roughly breaking even," as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have started bearing fruit after massive layoffs.
In an interview with BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, Musk said Twitter has about 1,500 employees now, a sharp decline from "just under 8,000 staff members" before he took it over in October.
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since Musk's $44 billion acquisition, as its layoffs have also included many engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.
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 had not lasted 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 over 3 million listeners, adding the company currently has all-time high user numbers.
Twitter has been hit by a massive decline in advertising since its acquisition.
Musk had said that was because of the cyclical nature of ad spending, some of which were "political." However, he said on Wednesday most of its advertisers have returned.
The billionaire, who also runs electronic car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, said he has no one in mind to succeed him as Twitter's chief executive.
Musk has faced scrutiny from Tesla investors about how much time he spends running the social media platform and has previously said the end of this year would be "good timing" to find a new Twitter CEO.
