Elon Musk’s ambitious plans for Twitter
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk outlined his financial ambitions for Twitter in a recent pitch deck he presented to investors last week, reported The New York Times.
While Musk’s $44 billion (R712 billion) acquisition of the social media platform is far from a done deal, his lofty financial plans for the company have raised some eyebrows.
The deck highlighted seven ambitious goals:
- Cut Twitter’s reliance on advertising to under 50%
- Generate $15 million (R243 million) in revenue using payments business
- Increase revenue per user by $5.39 (R87.25)
- Attain 104 million new subscribers for an unknown product called X Subscribers
- Reach 931 million users by 2028
- Quintuple Twitter’s revenue to $26.4 billion (R426.8 billion) by 2028
- Hire 3,600 new employees by 2025
Musk noted that around 90% of Twitter’s revenue came from advertising in 2020. According to the document, he wants to cut this to 45% within the next six years.
Musk also wants to generate $15 million in revenue by 2023 using a payments business — with this number growing to $1.3 billion by 2028.
Musk projected that these changes would increase the average revenue per user by $5.39 — from $24.83 in 2021 to $30.22 in 2028.
To meet these goals, Musk will look to increase Twitter’s number of paid users.
According to the pitch deck, Musk has planned a subscription product called X Subscribers, which he says will have nine million users in 2023 and 104 million users by 2028.
While the document did not detail what the X Subscribers product is, Musk has previously hinted at an ad-free experience on the platform.
Additionally, Musk forecast that Twitter Blue users would increase to 69 million by 2025 and 159 million by 2028.
Twitter Blue is a $3-per-month subscription service that launched in November last year in the US, offering ad-free news articles from select publishers and the ability to undo tweets, among other conveniences.
According to the document, this would see Twitter quadruple its user base. Musk anticipates the total number of users will grow from 217 million last year to 600 million in 2025, and 931 million by 2028.
Musk claimed that these expansions should increase Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028 — up from $5 billion made last year.
In addition to his grand financial plans, Musk said that the company would also hire 3,600 new employees by 2025.
According to Twitter’s latest annual report, the company currently employs over 7,500 people and Musk projects this will increase to 11,072 by 2025.
However, Musk noted that this would fluctuate throughout the process as part of the takeover.
He expects the number of employees to rise in 2022 to 9,225 and then decrease to around 8,332 in 2023, before increasing to the predicted number by 2025.
Loading ...