On Oct. 5, Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk’s newly installed CEO of X (formerly Twitter) has a meeting on the books with the banks. These banks, you may recall, banded together in April of 2022 and, cajoled by Musk, agreed to lend Twitter $13 billion that was central to his campaign in taking the platform private.
Since the $44 billion deal closed last October, Musk has talked constantly about what a horrible investment he made. In July, he disclosed that ad revenue had dropped 50% since he bought the property, causing it to keep bleeding cash. A month later, he posted on X: "We may fail, as so many have predicted." And in early September, Musk suggested that Twitter may be worth a mere $4 billion, a stunning 10% of the purchase price. In a CNBC interview on September 28, Yaccarino, who has served as CEO for 100 days, acknowledged that X is still cash-flow-negative, but claimed that "90 percent" of the many clients who had quit the platform have returned.
