Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

From a separate NYT article:

Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.

That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand. While it had about $6 billion in cash before Mr. Musk’s buyout, a large portion of that probably went into the cost of closing the acquisition.

...

To make ends meet, Mr. Musk probably has to slash costs — by a lot. Over the weekend, he was said to be already moving to do so by ordering job cuts across Twitter. One investor who put less than $1 million in the buyout of the company said he was told by the head of Mr. Musk’s family office to expect that around 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees would be laid off.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...




Note that the article linked in this comment is a year old.


Yeah there's no way it's worth $19 billion. With its current expenses you can just sit back and wait for bankruptcy proceedings to pick it up cheap if you wanted it.


Was that his 4D chess plan all along?


The fact that he tried to get out of the deal is evidence that he had acted impulsively.



That doesn’t work so well when you’re the seller.


After the bankruptcy, you’ll see what he had brewing all along.


Wait, more job cuts? Sounds like slow walk into death to me, they seem to be barely keeping up and/or delivering any new features?


Does Twitter need "new features"?


Not unless it's a whole new concept. Demographic shift and trends show "traditional" social media is dead.


Isn't there a current push for it to act as a whole payment platform?


X is an Everything App, and those certainly need payment.


The quote is from a year ago.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: