As the global financial situation weighs on wallets and portfolios, big names like Meta, Twitter and Amazon have all initiated #layoffs in 2022. November tech layoffs alone have surpassed 45,000 heads, with the largest firms trimming the fat by 10,000+ heads each.

Some companies that go private disappear from public view. But Not Twitter. It’s hard to think of another corporate takeover whose aftermath has drawn much of the media attention, with many details leaking out. And that has surely complicated Elon Musk’s life, for instance, scaring away advertisers and possibly making it harder to recruit employees. Even so, Musk’s view that it would be easier to restructure Twitter as a private firm—expressed in an April text to Twitter’s then chair, Bret Taylor—was still probably right.

After all, while we’ve heard a lot about the untrammelled nature of Musk’s management style, we know little about what’s most important—the state of Twitter’s business, such as its current level of revenue, expenses and debt levels. Yes… Musk borrowed $13 billion in debt that carried very high interest rates.

It’s possible, though, that he will use his latest sale of Tesla stock this week, raising somewhere around $3.5 billion, to pay some of that off. That’s one interpretation of his tweet: “At risk of stating obvious, beware of debt in turbulent macroeconomic conditions, especially when Fed keeps raising rates.” The bottom line is that without knowing the key financial details, we can’t really assess the state of play.

As reported by the Information, based on the snippets that have been reported—such as ad revenue falling in some regions by as much as half—you can guess that lower revenue has largely offset the cost savings from employee cuts. It’s also likely that at current valuation levels Twitter’s equity has been all but wiped out.

Assume that its revenue is running at an annualized level of $4 billion now, down 20% from 2021. Then appl.