Twitter owner Elon Musk said on Saturday that the social media company is still losing cash because advertising has dropped by half, The Associated Press reported.
In a reply to a tweet offering business advice, Musk wrote, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to (about a) 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”
“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he concluded.
Musk, who took over Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, has tried to reassure advertisers who were concerned about the ouster of top executives, widespread layoffs and a different approach to content moderation. Some high-profile users who had been banned were allowed back on the site.
In April, Musk said most of the advertisers who left had returned and that the company might become cash-flow positive in the second quarter.
In May, he hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal executive with deep ties to the advertising industry.
Since that time, Twitter has upset some users by some of the restrictions it has imposed.
Earlier this month, Twitter announced that its users will soon need to be verified in order to use TweetDeck, which was previously free and is widely used by businesses and news organizations.
That move came days after Musk announced that unverified accounts in the Twitter Blue program (that do not pay for a monthly subscription) will be limited to reading only 600 posts per day, compared to verified accounts which will be able to read 6,000 posts per post per day. That number was later increased.
Musk explained that the reason for the move is "to deal with large volumes of information mining, or 'scraping,' and system malfunctions."
In a later post, Musk explained that the new limitations placed on Twitter usage are meant to combat addiction to social media and encourage people to look up from their phones.
Previous controversial moves by Musk included changes to the blue checkmark. One of Musk’s first product moves was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month, but the social media platform was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, causing Twitter to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps.
In April, Twitter removed blue checkmarks from many high-profile users who did not pay the monthly fee to keep them.
Musk has also implemented an authentication scheme for users. In addition to blue checkmarks for individuals, the new scheme includes a gold checkmark for companies and a grey checkmark for government accounts.
In early July, Twitter got a new competitor in the form of Facebook owner Meta’s new text-focused app, Threads. Twitter responded by threatening legal action against Meta, accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s company of unlawfully using Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property by hiring former Twitter employees to create a “copycat” app.