Yaccarino states Twitter is nearing profitability after rebranding
On Thursday, Linda Yaccarino, CEO of social media platform X, announced that the company previously recognized as Twitter is on the verge of reaching a break-even point and is actively recruiting new employees to strengthen its workforce, which had been reduced by owner Elon Musk.
Yaccarino shared the news in an interview with CNBC, where he defended the platform’s security and Musk’s decision to replace its globally recognized name with X.
The former advertising executive claimed that brands are returning to the X platform, naming Coca Cola, Visa and State Farm as the group.
He partially acknowledged X’s policy of allowing users to post anything legal, no matter how “terrible,” but preventing it from being shared or profiting from advertising.
“If it’s legal but it’s horrible, it’s extremely difficult for you to see it,” Yaccarino argued.
However, he sidestepped the question of where misinformation or unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, perhaps even promoted by Musk himself, fit into this formula.
Musk said in a Twitter chat last month that the company’s cash flow was “still negative” due to a roughly 50 percent drop in advertising revenue “as well as a heavy debt load.”
But Yaccarino said in an interview Thursday that the X is “pacing well” and “pretty close to breaking even.”
He also added that the company was on a hiring spree after Musk cut Twitter’s workforce from 8,000 to about 1,500 following his $44 billion purchase last October.
With marketers deploring Musk’s management style and mass firings that destroyed content moderation, the platform’s ad business collapsed.
In response, the entrepreneur has shifted to users paying for subscriptions and third-party apps paying to access the platform to generate revenue.
Musk has said that he wants to create a super application inspired by the Chinese WeChat, which would act as a social media platform and also offer messaging and payment services.
“If you stay on Twitter or stay with whatever your previous brand is, the change is usually just incremental and you’re graded on the old report card,” Yaccarino said of the name change to X.
He said Musk is focused on product design while running the rest of the company.
“Elon works on the technology, dreams up what’s next, and then hands the message off to me,” Yaccarino said.
“I’ll bring it to market.”
He dismissed a potential cage match between Musk and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg as perhaps just a “humorous back and forth” between billionaires.
“I don’t think I’ll make the undercard of the cage fight,” Yaccarino joked.
“Let’s see if that cage match actually happens.”
He added that he saw Musk practicing for a fight last week in San Francisco, so it’s for sure.
