Twitter loses nearly half advertising revenue since Elon Musk takeover

Twitter boss Elon Musk has revealed his social media site has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since the billionaire bought the company for $44bn (£33.6bn) last October. 

He said Twitter had not seen the increase in sales that had been expected in June, but that July was a “bit more promising.” 

Musk took over the company in 2022 and in an effort to cut costs he sacked around half of Twitter’s staff. 

Rival app Threads – from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has around 150 million users, according to some estimates. 

Twitter is struggling under a heavy debt load. Cash flow remains negative, and whilst Musk did not put a time frame on the 50% drop in ad revenue, in a tweet at the weekend he said: “Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.”

After sacking thousands of employees and cutting cloud service bills, Musk said Twitter was on track to post $3bn in revenue in 2023, down from $5.1bn in 2021. 

Advertisers fled Twitter when Musk made changes to the company’s content moderation rules.