Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, claimed on Saturday that the social media site he paid $44 billion for in October had lost around half of its ad income.
In response to a user who offered ideas on how to finance the network, the billionaire said in a post, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”
Without going into greater detail, he continued, “Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”
According to Insider Intelligence, Twitter was predicted to make less than $3 billion in 2023, a decrease of one-third from 2022.
Since taking control of Twitter, Musk has made changes that have alienated both users and advertisers.
Musk said earlier this month that Twitter will only allow verified accounts to see 10,000 messages every day.
There is a daily cap of 1,000 tweets that non-verified users, who often have free accounts, can view.
The number of tweets from new, unverified accounts is capped at 500.
A few days later, Twitter said that starting next month, only “verified” users will have access to TweetDeck, a popular tool that lets users watch many accounts simultaneously.
The adjustments were made when Threads, a Twitter competitor app introduced by Facebook parent Meta, enrolled more than 100 million users in its first five days.
Twitter is estimated to have 200 million regular users, but since Musk purchased the service and fired hundreds of employees, it has experienced several technical difficulties.
Despite the company’s denials, Musk has vowed to sue Meta for allegedly stealing trade secrets and intellectual property.