X (aka Twitter) is making $600 million per quarter in ad revenue and this is 70% of total revenue. This is $3.4 billion annually.
Elon Musk had said expenses were about $2 billion per year and another $1 billion per year for debt servicing. This was after cutting excess staff and other expenses.
The total comes to $857 million (600/70%) per quarter, including subscription revenues, amounting to $3.4 billion annually. This represents a 14% decrease in revenue compared to the previous earnings of Twitter. However, since Elon Musk's cost-cutting measures, there should be an…
— Elie Messo (@ElieMesso) December 12, 2023
Right. iirc, Elon had said expenses were about $2B/yr plus about $1B/yr in debt service. So they should be near breakeven based on these revenue estimates. Once the debt gets paid down, their profits will be substantial, even if they don’t grow the business, which I expect they…
— J (@jaaron31) December 12, 2023
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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That is really positive cashflow and not really profit.
Excess staff?
80% of the Twitter employees were let go and this did not cause the site to break in terms of uptime and various functions. The company functions with 20% of the staff that existed before.
Since 2018 up to Musk, Twitter saw a drastic fall in the revenue generated per employee. The number fell from $776,112 in 2018 to our annualized figure of $634,666 in 2022, illustrating the firm’s continued struggles to turn a profit.
At the same time, Twitter almost doubled its headcount from 3,920 in 2018 to around 7,500. Twitter was losing $4M/day. About $1.5 billion per year when it was purchased.
Brian, what alternate universe are you living in? Ad revenue has slumped to under $2.5B, and that’s from a somewhat neutral Bloomberg article. It states, “ The previously unreported sales figures underscore with greater clarity advertisers’ unease with how X is handling content moderation under Musk, and in particular the new owner’s posts that amplify antisemitic and other extremist views.” Do we see the problem yet of why advertisers are running in the other direction?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/musk-s-x-2023-ad-sales-projected-to-slump-to-about-25-billion/ar-AA1lp3Iy
Lol I think you are the one living in an alternative universe.
What exactly is wrong with what Brian said?
It can be the case that X lost advertising revenue and X is also profitable (or nearly so). These are not mutually exclusive statements. There are two variables in the equation of profit/loss. If costs are larger than revenues then you have a loss. Musk greatly reduced costs, probably enough to remain at a break even despite some advertisers abandoning the platform due to a pressure campaign.
X is financially fine. If anything it is doing dramatically better than it was before Musk took over.
Problems with reading comprehension?
$2,5B ad revenue + $0.9B in subscription revenue perfectly matches Brian’s estimates.
did you miss the fact that they addressed the advertising loss in the second set of tweets? those losses are less than the savings they made from cutting staff.