France Press agency
Linda Iaccarino, CEO of social media platform X, said Thursday that the company formerly known as Twitter is “close” to break-even and is hiring to bolster a staff cut by owner Elon Musk.
Yaccarino shared the news during an interview with CNBC in which she defended the platform’s integrity as well as Musk’s decision to replace its globally recognized name with X.
The former advertising executive has claimed that brands are returning to the X platform, naming Coca Cola, Visa and State Farm as among them.
It commended, in part, X’s policy of allowing users to post anything legal, no matter how “terrible”, but preventing them from participating in or profiting from ads.
“If it’s legal but it’s horrible, it’s very hard for you to see,” Iaccarino argued.
However, it sidestepped the question of where misinformation or unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that Musk himself may have promoted fit into this formula.
Musk said last month on an exchange on what was then called Twitter that the company “remains negative cash flow” due to a drop in advertising revenue of about 50 percent “as well as a heavy debt load.”
But Iaccarino said in the interview on Thursday that the X is “running well” and “very close to equalization”.
She also added that the company was in a hiring curve, after Musk lowered the ranks of Twitter employees from 8,000 workers to about 1,500 after acquiring $44 billion last October.
With marketers soured by Musk’s management style and mass firings causing content moderation, the platform’s advertising business has collapsed.
In response, the entrepreneur has moved towards paying users for subscriptions and third-party apps to pay for access to the platform to bring in revenue.
Musk said he wanted to create a super app inspired by China’s WeChat, which would act as a social media platform and also offer messaging and payments.
“If you stay on Twitter, or stay whatever your previous brand was, the change tends to be only incremental and graded by an old report card,” Yaccarino said of the name change to X.
She said Musk has been focusing on product design, while running the rest of the company.
“Elon works on the technology, dreams about what’s coming, and then passes the baton to me,” Iaccarino said.
“Bring him to the market.”
Played out of a possible cage match between Musk and meta boss Mark Zuckerberg it likely is nothing more than a “humorous back-and-forth” between billionaires.
“I don’t think I’ll be on the undercard for a cage match,” Iaccarino quipped.
“We’ll see if this cage match actually happens.”
She added that she saw Mask training for the fight last week in San Francisco, that’s for sure.
