Technology

X should turn profit next year, CEO says

Twitter CEO Elon Musk, center, speaks with Linda Yaccarino, then chairman of global advertising and partnerships for NBC, at the POSSIBLE marketing conference, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, in Miami Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, should turn a profit by early 2024, CEO Linda Yaccarino said Wednesday.

Yaccarino, who took the reins of the company from billionaire owner Elon Musk in June, said at Vox Media’s annual Code Conference that the social media company is “just about break-even.”

She added that 90 percent of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform, and about 1,500 advertisers have returned within the last 12 weeks, The Verge reported.

Since Musk acquired the social media company last fall and began instituting a multitude of controversial changes, the platform has struggled to retain advertisers. 

Musk said in a post on X earlier this month that the company’s U.S. advertising revenue was “still down” 60 percent, although he did not specify from when. 

In the post, he blamed X’s lagging advertising revenue on the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which documented a rise in “virulent antisemitism” on the platform under Musk in a recent report.

Musk’s feud with the organization, which aims to fight hate speech and antisemitism, is not the first of its kind. 

Last month, he sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit organization that tracks online hate speech, alleging it was responsible for “tens of millions of dollars” in lost advertising revenue. 

Like the ADL, the CCDH has published reports about the spread of hate speech and misinformation on X and other online platforms.

Musk has faced heavy criticism from the civil society groups for his decisions to roll back content moderation rules and reinstate previously banned accounts, such as that of former President Trump, since taking over the platform.