Twitter cash flow negative due to declining ad revenue, heavy debt: Musk

New Delhi (IANS). Elon Musk, who has begun paying a select group of creators as promised, has admitted Twitter’s balance sheet is still in the red due to a 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and heavy past debt .

Twitter hit an all-time high for “device user second usage” last week, and nearly all advertisers who left are “either back or have said they will be back.”

Still, the company is financially weak as many advertisers who left after Musk’s acquisition have not returned.

“Due to a 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt burden, our cash flow remains negative,” Musk said in a tweet.

“We need to reach positive cash flow before we can have the luxury of anything else,” he said.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO had acquired the micro-blogging platform in October last year for $44 billion, which included debt of about $13 billion.

Musk told the BBC in April that “almost all” advertisers have started buying ads on Twitter again.

A follower suggested to Musk on increasing revenue: “You will never see 50 percent of traditional ads again. Charge people whose following is at the tier level (a few dollars per follower). People with most followers need/use this platform the most for their brand ambitions but would never pay to advertise. One dollar per 1,000 or something like that.”

However, it is still unclear how much Twitter paid creators in the first round of payments.