According to persons familiar with the situation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Twitter’s sales and adjusted profitability fell by roughly 40% for December compared to the same period last year.
The news comes after several advertisers reduced their expenditure on the social media platform after Elon Musk assumed control of the company on October 27. As a result, statistics from the advertising research firm Standard Media Index indicated a 71% decrease in advertising spend on Twitter throughout December.
In December, Elon Musk, who had previously expressed concern over the potential of Twitter going out of business in November, stated that the company was on schedule to reach “approximately cash flow break-even” in 2023.
In January, Twitter paid the first interest on a loan issued by banks to help finance billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media business last year.
In its most recent round of layoffs, since Elon Musk took control, Twitter fired at least 200 workers last week, accounting for nearly 10% of its workforce, according to sources.
According to the NYT story, which cited people familiar with the situation, the layoffs affected product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site stability, which helps keep Twitter’s different functions online.
According to Musk’s statement from last month, the business has roughly 2,300 active employees.
The most recent job layoffs come after a large-scale layoff in early November when Elon Musk ordered Twitter to fire approximately 3,700 workers as a cost-cutting move.
In November, Musk claimed that the service had seen a “huge loss in revenue” as a result of advertisers cutting back due to worries over content filtering.
The social media network fired scores of staff on Saturday in an effort to counter a decline in revenue, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Musk said in November that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation.
Recently, some of Twitter’s content providers began receiving a portion of the advertising money.
