Twitter has lost almost half of its advertising revenue since the day it passed into the hands of billionaire Elon Musk last October, its owner has revealed.

According to the BBC, he admitted that the company did not show the expected sales growth in June, but added that July was “more promising”.

Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees when he took over in 2022, a move aimed at cutting operating costs.

However, Mark Zuckerberg’s competing platform Threads (Meta), which premiered a few days ago, already has 150 million users, according to estimates. The integration of the new platform with Instagram automatically gives access to two billion users.

Meanwhile, Twitter is struggling under a heavy debt load. Cash flow remains negative, Musk said over the weekend, though the billionaire didn’t put a time frame for the 50 percent drop in ad revenue.

In a tweet he said: “We have to get to positive cash flow, everything else is a luxury.”

After laying off thousands of employees and shutting down accounts from cloud services, Musk said Twitter was on track to report revenue of $3 billion in 2023, up from $5.1 billion in 2021.

The latest development is a sign that aggressive cost-cutting measures have not been enough to spark the return of advertisers who left after changes to content moderation rules.

This was despite an interview Musk gave to the BBC in April, in which he said most people had returned to the site.

But Meghana Dhar, a former head at Meta, said Twitter Inc was struggling before Musk’s takeover.

“Elon and Twitter are in a really tough spot right now,” he told the BBC’s Today show. “To be fair to Elon, though, we’ve seen this decline in Twitter revenue before Elon — it was kind of a steady decline.”