Musk reveals an "unexpected" surprise about Twitter's revenue

 US billionaire Elon Musk said on Saturday that Twitter's cash flow remains negative due to low advertising revenue. Musk revealed that the decline in advertising revenues amounted to nearly 50 percent, in addition to the heavy debt burden, which did not live up to his expectations in March that the platform might reach positive cash flow by June.

"We need cash flow positive before we can have the luxury of anything else," Musk wrote in a tweet. This is the latest sign that aggressive cost-cutting measures since Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October were not enough alone to shift cash flow into positive territory, and it also indicates that Twitter advertising revenue may not have recovered as quickly as Musk spoke in an interview with the BBC (BBC). BBC) in April when it said most advertisers had returned to the site.

After laying off thousands of employees and cutting bills for cloud services, Musk said the company cut its non-debt expenses to $1.5 billion from the $4.5 billion expected in 2023. Twitter also has to make annual interest payments of about $1.5 billion. It was not clear how long Musk had indicated the 50 percent drop in ad revenue.

Musk stated that Twitter is heading to achieve revenues of $3 billion in 2023, down from $5.1 billion in 2021. Criticism was directed at Twitter accusing the platform of being lax in supervising content, which was followed by the withdrawal of a large number of advertisers for fear that their ads would appear alongside inappropriate content.