Musk says Twitter’s workforce has shrunk dramatically from 8,000 to 1,500 people

After the layoffs under the new owner Elon Musk, Twitter only has about 1,500 employees, compared to almost 8,000 before, Musk reports this in an interview with the British broadcaster BBC on Wednesday.

Shortly after taking over the online service for around $ 44 billion last October, the tech billionaire cut the number of employees roughly in half in a first step. It was “painful” to lay off so many people, but without radical austerity measures, Twitter had only “four months to live,” Musk said.

Before the acquisition, Twitter earned almost all of its business from advertising revenue, such as when companies pay to have their tweets appear in users’ news feeds. Musk’s purchase was followed by a wave of advertisers fearing a negative climate for their tweets among the controversial entrepreneur. Sales have halved, as Musk admitted at the time. At the same time, Twitter must pay interest on about $12 billion in loans for the acquisition.

Musk now said in the BBC interview that advertisers have returned or are planning to. There are more ads again and Twitter has only minimal losses, he added, without citing numbers. Since the company is no longer listed on the stock exchange, it no longer has to publish quarterly reports.

After announcing the purchase in spring 2022, Musk tried to get out of the deal relatively quickly. He referred to an allegedly large number of automated bot accounts, which means that the price he proposed is no longer justified. The $44 billion was a hefty premium to Twitter’s stock market value at the time.

Twitter’s management, which initially opposed the takeover attempt, but after the agreement with Musk did work for the interests of shareholders, took him to court. When asked if he ultimately made the Twitter purchase because a judge would have forced him to do it anyway, Musk said in the BBC interview: “Yes, that’s why.”

(yam/sda/awp/dpa)