Ripple CTO jokes about Twitter’s $40m revenue loss

The chief technology officer of Ripple, David Schwartz, commented on the news that Twitter lost $40 million in advertising revenue due to the platform’s ‘Community Notes’ feature.

Man did I call it. Musk just revealed that Twitter lost $40 million in advertising revenue due to advertisers not appreciating having their ads fact checked. https://t.co/TiQbbzTvRw

— David «JoelKatz» Schwartz (@JoelKatz) May 17, 2023

‘I caused this. Musk just reported that Twitter lost $40 million in advertising revenue because advertisers did not appreciate the fact-checking of their own materials,’ wrote Schwartz.

The head of the social network, Elon Musk, said in an interview with CNBC that the company lost this amount after two fairly large advertisers were subjected to user fact-checking.

Schwartz joked that he was to blame for the situation. In one of his earlier posts, he commented on an advertisement for vegetable-frying bags that the community criticised, adding several notes about the product’s poor quality.

Musk noted that he had spoken with the departing advertisers, advising them simply to refute users’ statements. The billionaire still believes that the new feature on Twitter is the right solution.

According to the businessman, machine code automatically selects useful comments and posts them under the main post.

He also noted that at the time of the purchase Twitter had an annual negative cash flow of $3 billion, and $1 billion was in the company’s bank accounts.

Earlier, Musk said that the social network’s approximate profit for the year would be about $3 billion. In his view, this figure could have been around $4.5 billion if “2023 had been normal”.

Earlier in May, Elon Musk announced his departure as Twitter’s chief executive. Linda Yaccarino, head of NBCUniversal’s advertising division, will take over the post.