Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk looked back on his last three months as CEO of Twitter. The billionaire said it has been “extremely difficult” as he “had to save Twitter from bankruptcy” while doing his duties at Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk also added that the microblogging site continues to have challenges.
Taking to his official Twitter account, “The last 3 months have been extremely difficult as I had to save Twitter from bankruptcy, while performing essential duties for Tesla and SpaceX. I wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone. Twitter still has challenges, but now it tends to break even if we continue like this. Public support is greatly appreciated.”
Musk replied this to a news article published by WSJ titled ‘When does Elon Musk sleep? Billionaire talks limits to fix Twitter and his back pain.
Musk lamented the company’s “massive drop in revenue” just a week after closing the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter in October, which he blamed on “activist groups lobbying advertisers,” Fox Business reported. Since then, he has made a number of changes to Twitter, according to the news report.
Elon Musk cut Twitter’s staff by roughly half, introduced a revamped microblogging site, subscription service Blue and even auctioned off memorabilia from the company’s San Francisco headquarters, Fox Business reported. He defended the Twitter layoffs in November, noting that the company was losing $4 million a day.
After the layoffs, former Twitter employees around the world have filed charges of breach of contract and discrimination, adding to owner Elon Musk’s growing legal woes. The company had laid off about 3,700 employees in early November as part of a cost-cutting move by Musk, and hundreds more have since quit.
According to reports citing attorney Lisa Bloom, the number of employees taking legal action against the company is increasing daily. The attorney said she was already representing about 100 former employees fired by Musk.
Meanwhile, in a new change on Twitter, the company announced that it will start charging a fee to access its API, which developers use to build third-party services, according to the news report. As the Twitter website explains, its API is a set of programmatic endpoints that can be used to understand or build the conversation on the social media platform. It allows software developers to find, retrieve, interact with, or create a number of different resources, including tweets, users, spaces, and direct messages.
Earlier, on January 13, Musk revealed some of the changes that will be introduced to the microblogging platform starting next week. He wrote: “Bookmark button moving to tweet details page, fixing image length cropping and other minor bug fixes next week.”
A US jury recently acquitted Musk of claims by Tesla Inc investors that he defrauded them when he tweeted in 2018 that he was considering taking the company private and had “funds secured” to make the deal happen.
After the verdict, Elon Musk thanked the jury and wrote on Twitter: “Thank God the wisdom of the people has prevailed! I am deeply grateful for the jury’s unanimous finding of innocence in the Tesla 420 private taking case.” . Musk was sued by shareholders who said the tycoon acted recklessly in an effort to squeeze investors who had bet against the company. The verdict rejected claims that the electric carmaker’s chief executive officer violated securities laws and should pay billions of dollars in damages.