Elon Musk said Monday that Twitter revenue has been cut in half since he took ownership of the company. In a Twitter Spaces conversation with long-shot presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Twitter CEO said it was “frankly a struggle for Twitter to break even” because of the loss of ad dollars since he took the helm. More than half of Twitter’s top advertisers suspended ads this winter, but this is the first time Musk has publicly acknowledged the extent of the damage. He had claimed as recently as April that “almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back.” In the Twitter Spaces conversation, Musk claimed the losses were the result of his own commitment to protecting free speech, saying “I don’t care how much it costs or what it takes … If we lose free speech we lose democracy.” (Some of the companies suspended advertising over technical issues like impersonation accounts.)
