Twitter could be bankrupt, says Elon Musk, even as key executives resign

Here is another shocker from the ever mercurial Elon Musk: Twitter could be bankrupt.

He made this startling statement barely two weeks after buying the social media giant for $44 million.

The company could lose billions of dollars next year.

Musk said the firm was being drained of over $4 million a day, largely because advertisers took to their heels once he took over the helm of affairs.
Twitter has $13 billion in loans after the deal.

Musk warned that Twitter would not be able to outlast the financial downturn if it does not add more money to its subscription coffers.

The revelation comes even as top executives quit the firm. Yoel Roth, who supervised Twitter's response to combat hate speech, misinformation and spam on the service, quit his job. So too did Twitter's Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner, Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty.

Musk plans to turn the platform into a force for truth and stop fake accounts.

The only thing that seems to be constant in Musk’s life is change. Change of mind, that is. He first announces something one day, the next day he does a flip-flop on the same issue.

Musk launched the monthly $8 Twitter Blue subscription service and a separate grey "official" badge for some highly special accounts.
But within hours he scrapped the grey label.

The launch also saw the mushrooming of fake accounts as users used the opportunity to impersonate celebrities and politicians such as NBA star LeBron James or former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Musk sold $3.95 billion worth of shares in his firm Tesla. This made many nervy about the fallout of his Twitter buy on the world's most valuable automaker.

An attorney on the company's privacy team says that Musk has just one thing in mind: how to make money from his users. He does not care much for human rights activists or dissidents.

Musk has pulled the plug on remote work at Twitter for the remaining 50 per cent of the employees. He warned them that the road ahead was very tough and would require ‘intense work’ to succeed.

Already, users are switching loyalties to other platforms. One of them, Mastodon, has gained immense popularity within no time.

“We hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool," Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, said in a post on the platform.