Elon Musk says Twitter is stabilizing but would have been without him; Thanks Disney, Apple for the promotion

Elon Musk urged advertisers to “use Twitter yourself and believe what you see on Twitter, not what you read in the papers.”

“Journalists have something. They are trained to never write a positive story,” the CEO of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX said at a Morgan Stanley media conference on Tuesday. A surge in hate speech after he took Twitter private last fall spooked some advertisers, but others never went away, he said, thanking Disney and Apple for their longtime partners. “Thank you,” he said.

“Disney is a big advertiser on Twitter, one of our biggest advertisers. Apple is one of our biggest advertisers. Obviously, Disney doesn’t want its ads to be next to things that aren’t appropriate for a family audience,” Musk said. “But being there [other] Products with a higher R rating. Advertisers can actually customize [ads to] what content they like. The same is true on television. The ad you see at 7pm is not the same ad you see at midnight. It is up to the advertisers where they want to place their content.”

Warner Bros. Discovery is also on board as Musk noted a campaign for HBO’s The White Lotus. “I talked to you [WBD CEO] David Zaslav, he’s great, and he said, ‘Why can’t we? white lotus Preview every time someone mentions it white lotus on twitter?’ And I said, “Absolutely.” One of the most obvious yet profound things we do is query advertising…you don’t need advanced AI for that.”

“The most important thing is that the ad is effective, relevant and moves a business forward.”

The media sector more broadly is also in the midst of an advertising slump caused by fears of a recession.

Usage and engagement on Twitter has never been higher, Musk said. The biggest challenge remains monetizing the platform’s large, global, educated and affluent user base. The wider media sector happened to be in an advertising slump fueled by recession fears. Still, he said the former regime put a lot of money on the table and also had an unsustainable cost base.

He said when the deal closed on Oct. 29, Twitter “was running at a negative run rate of three billion a year and had a billion in the bank. So it’s a very bad situation.” Expenses soared and the company “would have gone bankrupt in four months,” he emphasizes that the very public, far-reaching rounds of layoffs and restructuring increase the (interest-free) burn rate, which has fallen to about $1.5 billion and that Twitter ‘ n has a chance to make cash flow next quarter, depending on the advertising market positive “It’s been a very difficult four months, but I’m very optimistic about the future.”

He also considered why he bought the company: “Not because it would be a profitable gold mine. In fact, it was tough and tough and I leave every day.

It was for “freedom of speech” and “the future of our civilization…that’s why I did it”. (He didn’t mention that he tried to pull out of the deal pretty quickly after making it.) He said old Twitter has “a big thumb on the scales in favor of the left. But it’s not conducive to a healthy national dialogue.It’s a good thing when you see people you don’t like saying things you don’t like, as long as you can add your own input as well.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reports today that the Federal Trade Commission has asked Twitter to release internal communications related to Musk and detailed information about the layoffs amid concerns that downsizing could jeopardize the company’s ability to protect users. The FTC investigation focuses on the company’s ability to honor a $150 million settlement related to alleged data breaches.