After mass redundancies, cost savings, and the slump in advertising revenue, the online service Twitter, which was recently renamed X, is said to be on the upswing again. X is “pretty close to breaking even,” CEO Linda Yaccarino told US broadcaster CNBC on Thursday. In the interview, she announced the hiring of new employees. After twelve years as head of advertising at the media group NBCUniversal, Yaccarino took over the management of the short message service two months ago and replaced Elon Musk at its head. The multi-billionaire, who bought the company last year, remained CEO.
Musk is focused on product design and working on the future of the platform, she’s running the rest of the company and bringing it “to market,” Yaccarino said. She is autonomous, emphasized the X boss when asked by the CNBC journalist.
Technology billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform last year for $44 billion (€40.15 billion) and initiated a radical restructuring. He dismissed top management and more than two-thirds of the approximately 8,000 employees. As a result, advertising revenue plummeted. In addition, Musk made profound changes for users, including the introduction of a paid subscription for account verification.
Most recently, Elon Musk renamed Twitter X at the end of July and gave the platform a new logo. His vision is to convert the platform into a super app based on the Chinese model WeChat, which can also be used to process online purchases and payments.
Battle against competitors, trouble in France
And while Elon Musk is busy with rather bizarre plans for a show fight against Mark Zuckerberg, the X legal department is struggling with completely different topics. Most recently, X was fined $350,000 (around €320,000) for failing to hand over documents relating to ex-US President Donald Trump’s user account to special counsel Jack Smith in a timely manner. This emerges from a judgment made public on Wednesday by a federal appeals court in the capital Washington.
There is also a legal dispute with the AFP news agency. The company from France has filed a copyright lawsuit against the online service there. The agency accuses the short message platform of not paying for the distribution of journalistic content, as is required in France.
Several European media, including AFP, have now negotiated remuneration for their content with Google. Here, too, the dispute had previously escalated: the French antitrust authorities had imposed a fine of 500 million euros on the search engine group in 2021. On his platform, Musk called the lawsuit “bizarre.”
