Twitter (TWTR) reported earnings Thursday that missed revenue expectations, but posted better than expected user growth, in its first report since announcing plans to sell to Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk for $44 billion.
The company also called off its prior guidance due to the sale.
“Given the pending acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, we will not be providing any forward looking guidance and are withdrawing all previously provided goals and outlook,” the company said.
Here are the most important numbers from the report compared to what Wall Street was expecting, as compiled by Bloomberg.
Revenue: $1.20 billion versus $1.23 billion expected
Adjusted EPS: $0.90 per share
Active users: 229 million versus 226 million expected
Twitter shares were flat following the announcement.
The report comes at perhaps the most consequential period of Twitter’s existence. In early April, Musk revealed that he took a 9.2% stake in Twitter and was set to join the company’s board. But the mercurial CEO rebuffed the plan and began tweeting jokes about the firm.
Fearing a hostile takeover, Twitter’s board planned to adopt a poison pill that would have allowed shareholders to purchase shares of the company at a steep discount in an effort to minimize Musk’s sway over the microblogging site.
Musk, however, took a different route and filed a form with the Securities and Exchange Commission laying out his intent to purchase Twitter. Soon after, the board agree to sell the company to Musk for $54.20 per share.
Since then Musk has said he plans to ease content moderation on the platform raising fears that it will be inundated with hate speech and disinformation. Musk has also tweeted critical remarks about Twitter and its moderation decisions.
He’s also continued to regularly tweet memes along with his signature brand of edgy content including one tweet in which he said he planned to buy Coke next and add cocaine back into the recipe. Coke’s original early formula included traces amounts of a precursor to cocaine, according to Snopes.
On Monday, fellow billionaire and space industry rival Jeff Bezos inserted himself into the conversation questioning whether Musk’s reliance on China as Tesla’s second largest market could give that country’s government leverage to force Musk to remove content that criticizes the regime from Twitter.
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Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-q1-earnings-2022-120931426.html