Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com Billionaire tech mogul Musk, who bought Twitter in a highly indebted deal more than four months ago for $44 billion, said advertising revenue has fallen by as much as 50 percent since he took over.

But Musk said there are still some big advertisers who continue to advertise on Twitter, and he singled out and thanked Disney and Apple at the 2023 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecommunications conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, calling them Twitter's two biggest advertisers.

Musk also painted a critical picture of Twitter's financial situation. He said the company could have gone bankrupt in four months with declining advertising revenue and more debt payments. This situation requires "sometimes drastic action," Musk said.

In addition to reducing Twitter's workforce from 7500 to less than 2000 (a drop of more than 70%), the company also reduced its data centers from three to two to reduce cloud spending. All told, Twitter has reduced its annualized loss rate (excluding $1.5 billion in debt payments) from $4.5 billion to about $1.5 billion and achieved "the fastest product evolution in Twitter history."

"There were some bumps on the road, but that was to be expected," Musk said. Now we have an opportunity to grow Twitter into something amazing. He added: "I don't want to flag myself, but I think it's possible for us to achieve positive cash flow in the second quarter. "

Musk said Twitter has a lot of room for improvement in monetizing the time people spend on the platform. Twitter, he claims, attracts 130 million hours of attention from "the smartest people on the planet" every day; however, the company currently earns only 5-6 cents an hour in advertising revenue from those hours.

Musk said his goal with Twitter is to be the most timely and accurate source of truth,"no matter how unpleasant." A self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who has restored many accounts banned for violating Twitter policies, including Donald Trump, Musk reiterated his view that Twitter is an important tool for safeguarding free speech. "If we don't have a solid foundation for free speech, I fear for the future of our civilization. 'he said.

Today, he said,"the media controls the narrative," while on Twitter,"the public can control the narrative. It's a very remarkable thing,"and describes Social networks as forums for" citizen journalists."

Twitter suffered a widespread technical glitch Monday that caused users to click on links to third-party websites incorrectly. Musk explained the glitch simply: "What was supposed to be a small change to 1% of Twitter's user base turned out to be a catastrophic change to 100% of Twitter's user base." "

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