and google also saw significant advertising revenue declines. it s been a little higher on twitter, but a lot of the advertisers are coming back, so there is a cyclic drop which is still pretty significant, but in rough numbers, revenue dropped from 4.5 billion to three, and expenses went from 4.5 to six, creating a $3 billion negative cash flow situation, and twitter having $1 billion in the bank, that is four months to live. so, unless drastic action was taken immediately this company was going to die. let s talk about that drastic action, because almost immediately you sacked a lot of twitter workers. and i spoke to them, it was very easy to speak to them when it happened, and the way, they said, pretty much everyone said, is it felt quite haphazard and it felt a little bit uncaring. i wouldn t say uncaring. the issue was, like,
offered a poison pill, so they were like, hell no, you can t buy twitter, we d rather die. we ll, like, chew on cyanide before being bought, that was their initial response. and then you said, actually i don t want to buy it. and then they said, no, you must buy us, gun to the head, you have to buy us. i m like, are you the same people who said you would rather die than be bought? doesn t that seem odd? so, i guess my question to you is, you said that the reason was because of bots, because twitter was filled with bots. looking back at it now, was there a little bit of you that thought, actually, maybe i ve overpaid and actually maybe i don t want to do this, i want to get out of this? be honest. the problem was that the publicly stated user numbers were in excess of the real user numbers, so. i ve heard you talk about that,
for tiktok itself, ijust don t know enough about what is going on there. i can t say i have a strong opinion on tiktok. you don t have opinion on whether it should be banned or not? you know, i m generally against banning things. so i probably would not be in favour. it would help twitter, i suppose, if tiktok was banned because then people would spend more time on twitter and less time on tiktok, but even though that, even if it would help twitter, i would be generally against the banning of things. 0k. do you feel, sometimes, that your many business interests might get in the way of you having an opinion? for example, tesla has major connections in china. you would not have a certain opinion on something or feel uncomfortable about saying something because of your other business interests elsewhere?
i think your own lawyer said you couldn t get a fair trial in san francisco because there are lots of people don t necessarily like you here. i have to say, i was wrong, or he was wrong, i guess, because i was acquitted by a san franciscojury unanimously, so. do you have any regrets buying twitter? i think it was something that needed to be done. it has been quite difficult, you know, i would say the pain level of twitter has been extremely high, it hasn t been some sort of party, so it has been really quite a stressful situation for the last several months, not an easy one. apart from the pain, it has been quite painful but at the end of the day, were many mistakes along the way? of course.
the reason why you have agreed to do this is because you wanted to talk about the first six months as chief executive owner of twitter. yeah, it s kind of like, whatever you want to talk about, you know? so, how do you think it has gone? well, it has not been boring. it has been quite a roller coaster, so. things are going, i think my reasonably well. things are going, i think reasonably well. i think, reasonably well. we are seeing some all time highs in terms of total user time. so we passed 8 billion user minutes per day, which is a lot of user minutes. so usage is up, growth is good. the site works, mostly. we have had a few glitches here and there, but the site is working fairly well. and we re doing it with a small fraction of the original headcount. you mentioned outages there.