Twitter now has 1,500 employees, down nearly 80% since Musk’s acquisition

Elon Musk said that Twitter is roughly 'break even' and could become cash-flow positive this quarter

Twitter owner Elon Musk said on April 12 that the social media company now has about 1,500 employees, down nearly 80 percent from about 7,500 people in October 2022, highlighting the deep cuts the tech billionaire has made to slash costs at the company since he acquired it for $44 billion last year.

After taking over the firm in October 2022, Musk has aggressively reduced the company's expenditure, including cutting down employee benefits, pushing out the top management, emptying out offices, stopping payments to vendors, suppliers and landlords, and reducing its cloud costs apart from laying off employees.

In a Twitter Spaces interview with BBC on April 12, Musk defended these measures, saying they had to take drastic actions to save the company.

“When the transaction closed, Twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year (including $1.5 billion required to service the acquisition-related debt) and it had $1 billion in the bank, so that's four months to death,” Musk said.

These measures have helped the company operate at a “roughly break-even” situation, Musk said. “If current trends continue, we could be cash flow positive this quarter,” he said.

Also Read: 10 takeaways from Elon Musk’s BBC interview on Twitter, AI, blue tick and more

Musk also claimed that most of the advertisers who had left the platform after their acquisition have either come back or said they are coming back, apart from a few exceptions. He also touted increased usage and decent growth on the platform in the past few months, without disclosing any specifics.

“Many had predicted that Twitter would cease to function. Their predictions have not turned out to be true... We are literally on Twitter now”, Musk said during the Twitter Spaces session that saw an attendance of more than three million concurrent users.

That said, Musk did acknowledge glitches on the platform, including the multiple outages in recent months, although he claimed they “didn’t last very long”.

When asked about the most difficult thing Musk has done in nearly six months of his ownership, Musk stated it was shutting down a Twitter data centre around late December and early January, which led to issues with the company’s servers.

“I thought they were redundant but in fact, a lot of things were hardcoded to this one server centre. So we shut it down and it was quite catastrophic and we lost a lot of functionalities,” Musk said.

Also read: Doge in, Larry Bird out: How Elon Musk is reshaping Twitter

On a lighter note, Musk also repeatedly claimed that he is the CEO of Twitter anymore and that its current CEO is his dog Floki. “He’s got a black turtleneck, what more do you need?” he said.

Paid Verification

During the interview, Musk also said that any social media organisation that doesn't require paid verification will cease to be relevant in the future, stating that the only solution to avert the fake bot problem is by increasing the cost of making these accounts on the platform.

“Without these things, it’s trivial to make a million bots and will also take very little computing effort to do,” he said.

In December 2022, Twitter relaunched its subscription service Twitter Blue, which gave all individual users an option to buy a verified blue checkmark, once denoting notable and authentic users on Twitter. The company extended this subscription service across the world on March 24.

This was in complete contrast to Twitter's earlier account verification system, under which it used to give blue check marks to accounts it determined were authentic and in the public interest for free.

Also read: Will comply with India's laws than have employees go to jail: Twitter's Elon Musk on BBC's PM Modi documentary

Last month, the company announced plans to remove legacy blue checkmarks from user accounts who do not sign up for Twitter Blue by April 1, in a bid to shore up its subscription revenue. On April 12, Musk said the final date for removing legacy Blue checks would be April 20.

Following in Twitter's footsteps, Facebook parent Meta also introduced a paid verification subscription service called ‘Meta Verified’ for user profiles on February 19.

Targeted at content creators, the service lets users pay a monthly fee for features such as account verification, impersonation protection, and increased visibility and reach, among others.