SAN FRANCISCO: Linda Yaccarino, CEO of social media platform X, said on Thursday that the company formerly known as Twitter is “close” to breaking even and is hiring to beef up a staff slashed by owner Elon Musk.

Yaccarino shared the news during a CNBC interview in which she defended the safety of the platform as well as Musk’s decision to replace its globally recognised name with X.

The former ad exec claimed that brands are returning to the X platform, naming Coca Cola, Visa and State Farm as being among them.

She credited, in part, X’s policy of allowing users to post anything legal, no matter how “awful,” but stopping it from being shared or benefitting from advertising.

“If it is lawful but it’s awful, it’s extraordinarily difficult for you to see it,” Yaccarino contended. However, she skirted a question about where misinformation or unfounded conspiracy theories, perhaps even promoted by Musk himself, fit into that formula.

Musk said last month in an exchange on what was then called Twitter that the company was “still negative cash flow” due to a drop of around 50 per cent in advertising revenue “plus heavy debt load.” But Yaccarino said in the interview on Thursday that X was “pacing well” and “pretty close to break-even.”

She also added that the company was on a hiring bend, after Musk cut the Twitter employee ranks from 8,000 workers down to about 1,500 following his $44 billion acquisition last October.

As marketers soured on Musk’s management style and mass firings, which gutted content moderation, the platform’s advertising business collapsed.

In response, the entrepreneur has moved toward getting users to pay subscriptions and third-party apps to pay for access to the platform to bring in revenue.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2023