Elon Musk says he saved Twitter from $3B shortfall with cuts

Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter’s staff and slashed costs in order to save the company from a $3 billion hole in its budget, the mogul said.

“That is why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” Musk told Twitter users who tuned in to a Twitter Spaces voice chat on Tuesday night.

“This company is like, basically, you are in a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.”

Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late October with the help of $13 billion of debt. The Twitter boss is on the hook for interest repayments of around $1.5 billion a year.

“If you didn’t make any changes” Twitter’s net cash outflow would have been as much as $6.5 billion next year, Musk said.

According to Musk, Twitter was on track to generate approximately $3 billion worth of revenue while having around $1 billion in cash.

“I now think that Twitter will, in fact, be okay next year,” Musk said. He added that he expects Twitter to “roughly” break even on cash flow.

Musk also said that advertisers were asking “sane” but “tough” questions about whether they can expect any sort of return on their investments.

Analyst estimates indicated that Twitter was on track to generate some $5.2 billion in sales in fiscal 2022 before the company was bought out by Musk and taken private, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier on Tuesday, Musk announced that he would eventually step aside as CEO of Twitter once “someone foolish enough” could be found to succeed him.

Musk pledged to abide by the results of a Twitter poll asking his more than 122 million followers whether he should continue as CEO.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted to his followers on Tuesday after a majority of them voted that he should step down.

“After that, I will just run the software and servers teams.”

Musk has stated his view that it would be challenging to find someone willing to run Twitter, since the job requires one to “like pain a lot” given that the company has been “in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” he tweeted.

Musk’s tenure as head of the company has been filled with controversy. He’s suspended journalists’ accounts and reportedly even skipped paying rent of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

His leadership has also led to the release of internal docs dubbed the “Twitter Files” that have provided an inside look at the company’s actions before he took over, including Twitter’s censoring of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

Additional Reporting by David Propper