Musk says Twitter is losing cash because advertising is down and the company is carrying heavy debt

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Elon Musk says Twitter is still losing money because ads are down by half.

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In a response to a tweet offering business advice, Musk tweeted on Saturday, “We are still negative cash flow, due to (about) a 50% drop in ad revenue as well as a heavy debt load.”

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

Since he acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, Musk has tried to reassure advertisers who were worried about ousting top executives, widespread layoffs and a different approach to content moderation. Some notable users who were banned have been allowed back into the site.

In April, Musk said that most of the advertisers who left had returned and that the company could become cash flow positive in the second quarter.

In May, he named a new CEO, Linda Iaccarino, an NBCUniversal executive with deep ties to the advertising industry.

But since then, Twitter has annoyed some users by imposing new limits on the number of tweets they can view per day, and some users have complained that they are being denied access to the site. Musk said the restrictions are necessary to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data.

Twitter got a new contender this month when owner Facebook Meta launched a text-focused app, Topics, gaining tens of millions of subscriptions in just a few days. Twitter responded by threatening legal action.