SAN FRANCISCO — Two weeks after buying Twitter, Elon Musk painted an increasingly bleak financial picture for the company and outlined changes in a meeting with staff on Thursday and in his first companywide emails, amid an exodus of executives including the officials who oversaw content moderation and security.
At the meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk warned employees that Twitter did not have the necessary cash to survive, said seven people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure. He mentioned bankruptcy.
Mr. Musk added that he had recently sold Tesla stock to “save” Twitter. He has sold nearly $4 billion in Tesla shares recently, according to regulatory filings this week.
Even so, Mr. Musk said Twitter remained over-staffed after mass layoffs of half of the company’s 7,500 employees last week. Remaining workers needed to be more “hard core,” Mr. Musk said.
His statements echoed messages he shared in two emails sent to workers late on Wednesday. In those notes, Mr. Musk said “the economic picture ahead is dire.” He added that he planned to end Twitter’s remote work policy and wanted employees to renew their focus on generating revenue and fighting spam.
Twitter was too heavily dependent on advertising and vulnerable to pullbacks in brand spending, he added, and will need to bolster the revenue it gets from subscriptions. In another note to employees, he wrote that “the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.”