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Elon Musk says firing half the staff and 'cutting costs like crazy' helped save Twitter from $3B shortfall

Expecting Twitter to make a break on the net cash flow, Elon Musk thinks that 'Twitter will, in fact, be okay next year'

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: Amid Twitter ownership polls and controversies, Elon Musk said that in order to save Twitter, he had laid off half of its staff and cut costs, and was able to repair the social media giant's financial woes. On December 20 night, the Twitter boss told users "Not good since Twitter has US$1 billion in cash. That is why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy”.

He added that “this company is like, basically, you are in a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” and also said that next year, the bird app's outflow of net cash would have been as much as $6.5 billion, “if you didn’t make any changes”. The Tesla CEO acquired Twitter in late October for $44 billion supported by a $13 billion debt and he will have to make yearly repayment of interest of around $1.5 billion.

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According to the mercurial billionaire, the micro-blogging platform was set to make a revenue of approximately $3 billion while having nearly "$1 billion in cash". Expecting Twitter to make a break on the net cash flow, he also thinks that "Twitter will, in fact, be okay next year.” He also pointed out that advertisers sought answers on whether they can expect any investment returns soon. An estimate of $5.2 billion in sales was to be generated by Twitter as it was on track to make revenue for the financial year 2022 before its takeover by Musk, according to analysts, reports the New York Post. 

Within weeks of his Twitter takeover, Musk fired half of its 7,500 workforce citing reasons for insufficient staffing to undertake content moderation and concerns of governments and advertisers.

On December 20, the Twitter boss declared that he is looking for a new CEO for Twitter who is "someone foolish enough" to take the position following his announcement of stepping down as the CEO of Twitter. Musk shared a Twitter poll asking users to vote on whether he should continue in his position as CEO and wrote that he will abide by the results. After 57.5% of users voted to oust him as CEO, he addressed the poll as he tweeted, “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software and servers teams.”