According to CEO Elon Musk, he has saved Twitter from bankruptcy and it is now “trending to breakeven”. Speaking on the site he bought last year for $44 billion (at $54.20 per share), he said that the time since buying Twitter has been “extremely tough”. Twitter had been teetering on financial insolvency for years and has never made any profits.
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“Wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone,” Musk said, referencing the fact that he has had to juggle his roles of leading his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX, while trying to “save” Twitter. Musk says that important usage metrics are looking very strong, like user counts and minutes on the platform per user.
Elon Musk has become the first person to have $200 billion erased from their fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index. The massive loss of personal wealth is due to the Twitter acquisition, sure, but also because of the immense decrease in share price of Tesla, which is where the majority of his fortune is held at the moment.
Elon Musk has reduced about half of Twitter’s staff, introduced a revamped microblogging site Blue subscription service and even auctioned off memorabilia from the company’s San Francisco headquarters, Fox Business reported. He defended the Twitter layoffs in November, stressing that the company was losing USD 4 million a day.
Recently, Twitter announced that it will start charging a fee to access its API, which developers use to create third-party services, as per the news report. Earlier on January 13, Musk revealed some of the changes that were set to be introduced in the microblogging platform from next week onwards. He wrote, “Bookmark button moving to tweet details page, fixing image length crop & other minor bug fixes next week.
