Elon Musk has said that severe cost cuts at Twitter had repaired the company's dire finances as he set out to find a new CEO for his troubled social media platform.
The mercurial billionaire told a live chat forum that without the changes, including firing over half of Twitter's employees, the company would have bled $3 billion dollars a year.
"Not good since Twitter has $1 billion in cash. That's why I spent the past five weeks cutting costs like crazy," he told Twitter Spaces, a feature of the platform he bought for $44 billion.
"If... you're looking at it from my standpoint... basically, you're in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don't work," he said.
Just weeks into his ownership of Twitter, Musk fired about half of its 7,500-strong workforce, sparking concern that the company was insufficiently staffed to carry out content moderation and spooking governments and advertisers.
Mr Musk said that his strategy was paying off and that by massively reducing costs and building subscriber revenue, "I now think that Twitter will in fact be OK next year" and break even.
He added that he understood that advertisers were skittish over spending on his platform, but blamed their caution on the souring economic outlook and not worries about content moderation.
He said the new $8 subscription service called Twitter Blue would help make up the difference.
"Because otherwise, how do we pay the fruggin' server bill," Mr Musk said, adding that Twitter's hardware costs around $1.5 billion annually.
Musk to step down once replacement found
Mr Musk made the defense of his policies after he tweeted that he was on the hunt for a new CEO "foolish" enough to replace him.
He said he would then limit his duties to running the software and server teams at Twitter.
This followed a Twitter poll in which Mr Musk asked users whether he should stay on as the company's CEO - 57% of votes said he should step down.
Mr Musk had said on Sunday he would abide by the results.
He has not provided a timeframe for when he will step down and no successor has been named.
Mr Musk has used the Twitter polls to make other decisions on the platform, including the reinstatement of the account of former US president Donald Trump.
Mr Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter in October has been marked by chaos and controversy, with some investors questioning if he is too distracted to also properly run his electric vehicle carmaker Tesla Inc, in which he is personally involved in production and engineering.
This is the first time Mr Musk has mentioned stepping down as chief of the social media platform, after Twitter users voted for him to resign in a poll, which the billionaire launched on Sunday evening.
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022
The poll results capped a whirlwind week that included changes to Twitter's privacy policy and the suspension - and reinstatement - of journalists' accounts that drew condemnation from news organisations, advocacy groups and officials across Europe.
Wall Street calls for Mr Musk to step down had been growing for weeks and recently even Tesla bulls have questioned his focus on the social media platform and how it might distract him from running Tesla.
