Musk, speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference that
was webcast, said it was "startling" how poorly Twitter managed to
make money off its messaging service.
The company has reduced its non-debt expenditures to $1.5
billion from a projected $4.5 billion in 2023, helped by cutting its cloud
services bill by 40% and closing one data center, Musk said. Twitter has also
laid off thousands of employees.
Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc,
acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October. The company also faces annual
interest payments of about $1.5 billion as a result of the debt it took on in
the take-private deal, Musk said.
He added that Twitter has been hit by a "massive
decline in advertising," some of which he said was due to the cyclical
nature of ad spending and some of which was "political."
Twitter has been marked by chaos and uncertainty since the
acquisition by Musk. On Monday, it suffered a bug that prevented thousands of
users from accessing links, its sixth major outage since the beginning of the
year, according to internet watchdog group NetBlocks.
Musk said in reference to Monday's outage that what had been
intended as a small change to 1% of users ended up being a
"catastrophic" change for all. He added that engineers were doing a
lot of "clean up" in general of the Twitter software code.
Concerns over Twitter's stability have been widespread since
the Musk deal. Among the mass exodus were many engineers who were responsible
for fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.
The billionaire said he expected it would take a few years
to build a management team at Twitter. Musk, who has faced scrutiny from Tesla
investors about the amount of time he spends running the social media platform,
had previously said the end of this year would be "good timing" to
find a new chief executive to run Twitter.
He also reiterated his plans to introduce payments on
Twitter, and said he envisions users could eventually send money to each other
with one click.
"I think it's possible to become the biggest financial
institution in the world," he said.
Making ads more relevant on the platform is another focus
for the company, he said. Some advertisers have fled Twitter due to uncertainty
over how Musk, who has called himself a "free speech absolutist,"
would approach content moderation.
The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that European Union
regulators told Musk to hire more content moderators at Twitter in order to
comply with an upcoming law.
Musk said at Tuesday's Morgan Stanley event that both
Democrats and Republicans now trust Twitter to the same degree. The platform
had 253 million daily active users that were "monetizable" in the
fourth quarter, according to a slide displayed during the webcast.
Musk said Twitter currently earns 5 to 6 cents per hour with
users spending a combined "130 million hours of their time per day"
on the platform. He said the company could increase it to 15 to 20 cents.
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