Canadian-American billionaire Elon Musk stated that the "Twitter" platform is still losing money because advertising has dropped by half.

Musk said, in response to a tweet offering business advice, on Saturday, "We are still in negative cash flow due to a 50% drop in advertising revenues along with a heavy debt burden."

He concluded by saying, "We need to reach positive cash flow before we can afford any other luxuries."

Since Musk acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, he has tried to reassure advertisers who were worried about the ousting of senior executives, large-scale layoffs, a different approach to content moderation, and allowing some prominent banned users to return to the site.

In April, Musk said most advertisers who left had returned and that the company might become cash flow positive in the second quarter.

In May, he appointed a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an executive at NBCUniversal with deep ties to the advertising industry, but since then, Twitter has upset some users by imposing new limits on the number of tweets they can see per day, some users complained about being blocked from accessing the site, and Musk said the limits were necessary to prevent unauthorized scraping of data that could be valuable.

Twitter gained a new competitor this month from Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg, who launched a text-focused app, Threads, which gained tens of millions of subscriptions within days, and Twitter responded by threatening legal action.