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Elon Musk told Twitter staff that “bankruptcy is not out of the question” if the company’s current financial difficulties cannot be improved. Mr Musk’s gloomy view of the social networking company at a plenary session on Thursday afternoon, less than two weeks after he bought it for $44 billion, was first reported by Zoë Schiffer, the managing editor of tech news outlet Platformer . “We definitely have to bring in more cash than we spend. We don’t do that and there’s a huge negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of the question,” Musk said, according to a transcript of an audio recording obtained by The Verge. Musk also said he wants a billion users on Twitter. “So to achieve this good, how can we bring a lot of people to the platform? There are 8 billion people. If we don’t have at least a billion people in the system, then we have a very small percentage of people,” he said, according to the minutes. The news came as Axios reported that Twitter’s head of trust and security and the company’s interim director of advertising have left the company. Yoel Roth and Robin Wheeler have both been part of Musk’s leadership team since his acquisition and had appeared in a Twitter conversation on Wednesday designed to placate advertisers. Musk, who owns electric car company Tesla and is the world’s richest man, has had a chaotic tenure since buying the company, firing half the company’s staff and introducing several changes to subscription services and verification that were quickly abandoned . After offering anyone the ability to buy a “verified” blue tick on their profile for $8 a month, the site was flooded with scammers impersonating world leaders and brands. Among the fakes were a verified Nintendo account that tweeted an explicit photo of Mario and a fraudulent account claiming to be former President George W. Bush who tweeted that he “missed[es] killing Iraqis.” Uncertainty about verification and fraud accounts led some brands to stop advertising on the site, a development that further jeopardized the company’s financial prospects. In his first email to Twitter Earlier in the day, Mr Musk reportedly ended remote work and warned of an uncertain future for the company. According Bloomberg, Twitter’s new owner warned staff that the company faces “difficult times ahead” and that there is “no way to mask the message” about the company’s current financial situation. He added that it will take “intensive work” to help Twitter succeed.
