Elon Musk says he saved Twitter ‘from bankruptcy’ after ‘extremely difficult’ 3 months

Elon Musk said the past three months have been “extremely tough” as he struggled to “save Twitter from bankruptcy” while running his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

The billionaire’s candid admission follows his past warnings of financial plight on Twitter as he bought the struggling social media platform for $44 billion last October.

“Wouldn’t wish this kind of pain on anyone,” Musk tweeted Sunday about the difficult stretch.

“Twitter is still in trouble but is aiming to break even now if we continue like this. Public support is greatly appreciated!” he added.

Musk tempered his bullish outlook in a separate tweet, noting that Twitter is still “definitely not financially healthy yet” but “the trend is towards that” in the future.

“There is still a lot of work to be done to get there,” he said.

Twitter’s daily revenue fell 40% last month from January 2022 as many of the company’s top advertisers stopped or cut spending. according to tech news site Platformer. Reuters estimates that Twitter ad revenue was down 70% in December last year compared to last year.

At a meeting last November, Musk warned Twitter employees that the company could file for bankruptcy if it couldn’t close the revenue shortfall. That same month, Musk said Twitter was losing $4 million a day after a massive exodus of large advertisers led to a “significant drop in revenue.”

Since then, Twitter has released an upgraded version of its “Blue” subscription service, under which users can pay $8 a month for account verification and other perks in an attempt to increase revenue.

Musk also ordered drastic spending cuts at Twitter, including layoffs and cuts to everything from office perks to cleaning services at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. The rest of Twitter employees had to “settle” for a “tough” work environment or leave the company.

Musk confirmed that the search for his successor as CEO of Twitter is already underway, although he did not give an exact timeline for when he would step down.

In addition to his Twitter duties, Musk was recently called to serve as a key witness in a Tesla shareholder lawsuit. Shareholders claimed that a 2018 tweet in which Musk claimed “financing secured” for Tesla’s privatization caused them to suffer huge losses after the deal never went through.

Last Friday, a San Francisco jury ruled in favor of Musk, ruling that he was not responsible for misleading investors with a 2018 tweet.

Last year, Musk became the first person in history to lose $200 billion of his personal fortune, a fall that coincided with his high-priced Twitter deal and Tesla shares plummeting during a major sell-off in the tech sector.

Since then, Tesla has grown, with shares up 75% since the start of 2023. The company posted a record profit of $3.7 billion last quarter.