(PresidentialHill.com)- Twitter chief Elon Musk said the company may become profitable next year. He said the number of users has risen while he has simultaneously managed to cut costs. Speaking at a conference of investors, he said it was “startling” how bad Twitter had been at making money. The billionaire added that he has made significant changes since taking over the platform last year and engineers were cleaning up the site’s code. Twitter has however lost a large amount of advertising revenue – around 44%. Some advertisers have ceased using the platform partly due to Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist” and the reinstatement of several controversial accounts.
Musk made his latest comments only days after the platform experienced a technical bug that left many users unable to see images or connect to other sites. The bug would not allow users to click on links and the CEO responded by saying the platform was “brittle” and problems would soon be fixed.
Musk has stoked severe controversy since taking over. Many members of staff have been fired, which is believed to be behind the glitches experienced. One former staff member said around 10% of employees had been let go, including product managers, engineers, and data scientists. Esther Crawford posted a picture of herself sleeping on the floor at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. She wrote that her team was “pushing round the clock to make deadlines.” Crawford was later fired. Some staff received their termination notice via email while others concluded they had been let go when they couldn’t log in to their systems. One former employee, Martijn de Kuijper, posted a tweet that said, “Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email. Looks like I’m let go.”
Since the takeover, Musk has laid off more than 3,700 employees, and there are currently around 2,300 remaining. The platform has approximately 253 million active daily users. Musk purchased Twitter last October at a cost of $44 billion.
