Following a 50 percent drop in advertising revenue and heavy debt, Twitter’s cash flow remains negative, Elon Musk said Saturday. Musk had originally hoped that Twitter would reach positive cash flow by June.

“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

The negative cash flow indicates that the cost-cutting measures Musk has taken since his acquisition of the platform in October, including laying off around 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce, are not enough to make the business profitable.

The tweet stands in contrast to an April interview that Musk did with the BBC, in which he claimed Twitter was “roughly breaking even” and that most advertisers had returned to the site.

By laying off thousands of workers, Musk said the social media platform reduced its expenditures to USD 1.5 billion from an expected USD 4.5 billion in 2023.

Twitter must also pay USD 1.5 billion annually for debt it took on in Musk’s USD 44 billion takeover of the platform, which made Twitter private.

Musk said that Twitter would reach USD 3 billion in revenue by the end of the year, down from USD 5.1 billion in 2021.

Musk hoped to reduce content moderation, reinstating banned accounts and looking to make Twitter a platform of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”

He has been criticized for this outlook on content moderation, and many advertisers have left the platform — not wanting their advertisements to appear near inappropriate content.

Twitter appointed Linda Yaccarino, a former marketing executive at NBCUniversal, as CEO. The hiring signaled that ad sales are a priority, even as Twitter works to increase its subscription revenue.

Twitter’s advertising revenue from April to May was down 59 percent year-over-year, according to a New York Times report.

A month before Musk’s takeover, only 43 percent of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers were still advertising on the platform, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

Meta’s Threads, a rival to Twitter, surpassed 100 million downloads within its first week. Web traffic to Twitter has declined by 11 percent since the launch of Threads.