12th April, 2023
Elon Musk has admitted to making some mistakes since he took over as the Twitter CEO, saying that it has been a “stressful situation”.
In a rare interview with the BBC late on Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed that the company has let go of more than 6,000 employees.
According to Musk, Twitter now only has 1,500 employees, down from under 8,000 at the time of his acquisition. The layoffs represent about 80% of the company’s workforce.
It’s “not fun at all” and can sometimes be “painful,” the billionaire CEO told the British broadcaster at Twitter’s head office in San Francisco.
He claimed that “drastic action” was required because there was “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation.” That left Twitter (TWTR) with only “four months to live,” he estimated.
“This is not a caring [or] uncaring situation. It’s like if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job,” Musk said.
Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter in October 2022.
He tried to back out of the deal after initially offering to take over the company in April 2022, citing concerns about the number of bot accounts it had. Since then, he has completely restructured Twitter, firing top executives, laying off employees, and enacting new policies regarding how user accounts are verified or labelled.
He told the BBC that Twitter is now “roughly” breaking even and that advertisers are returning to the platform.
After the BBC objected, Musk promised to change the BBC’s label from “government-funded” to “public-funded.”
Over the weekend, the title was added. The BBC had objected, claiming that it “is and has always been independent. We are funded by the British public via the licence fee,” it explained.