Musk appears to have thought he would be greeted by people throwing flowers in his path as he crushed underfoot those woke lefties who were stopping people from spouting Jewish conspiracy theories.
Instead Twitter has only 1500 of its 7500 staff left, lost most of its advertisers, gained more lawsuits and ironically seen less “free speech” than before.
The Twitter boss told the BBC that although "the pain level of Twitter has been extremely high" since he took charge, the company is now "roughly breakeven." Had it continued its pre-buyout trajectory, Musk reckons the company had four months left before it ran out of cash.
While it is true that In 2021, the last full year before Twitter's buyout, the company made a net loss of $222.4 million on $5.1 billion of revenue, we don't know what Musk’s "roughly breakeven" means in any detail. Twitter is now a private company and he won't release quarterly financials.
But if Musk's comments are accurate, he will likely take the company's improving financial performance as validation for his management theory, and his belief that Twitter was bloated and spending well beyond its means.
After Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in November, a swath of celebrity influencers and casual users alike abandoned the platform in protest of the new owner's content moderation policies and massive layoffs across the company that particularly gutted teams responsible for user trust and safety.
Musk also told the BBC that the company has cut the number of data centres it uses from three to two to save costs while improving its algorithm that reduces its demands for computational power. However, this turned out to be a bit of a silly move as one of the centres contained crucial data and shutting it down resulted in outages.
Lately he has also used the platform to declare war on “liberal” news organisations he does not like. He called NPR with a "state-affiliated media" label. With that one bit of defamation NPR quit Twitter taking its nine million readers with it. Musk removed verification from the New York Times' Twitter account after the publication said it wouldn't pay for a checkmark.
Musk told the BBC that total user time on Twitter was at an all-time high, with the company recently passing 8 billion user minutes per day. That's no small feat in a world where Twitter competes with everything from TikTok to Netflix.
