Twitter’s December adjusted earnings and revenue fell about 40 percent, year over year, according to reporting in The Wall Street Journal. CEO Elon Musk, who completed his acquisition of the social platform in October, has instituted deep cuts as he tries to reinvent the company hobbled with an estimated $1 billion in interest per annum on the $13 billion he borrowed to helped pay for the company. The troubles are due in part to bad timing, as the ad market on which Twitter and other socials depend took an overall downturn. Musk, nonetheless, remains optimistic the company will at least break even in 2023.

That would be an achievement, suggests The Wall Street Journal, since “Twitter posted a net loss in eight out of the 10 years from 2012 to 2021 and hasn’t booked an annual profit since 2019.”

Reports indicate some advertisers have been returning to the platform after consigning it to a brief purgatory, the result of macroeconomic factors as much as the platform’s own relaxed content moderation standards.

“Shortly after Mr. Musk took over Twitter, many advertisers paused spending on the platform — a source of concern as advertising represented almost 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue in 2021,” WSJ reports, indicating that while Twitter did not individually report financials for the 31 days of December 2021 (when it was issuing quarterly earnings, as a public company), it ended Q4 2022 with net income of $182 million and $1.57 billion in revenue.

In the December 2022 “update to investors” obtained by WSJ, “Twitter reported a decline of about 40 percent year-over-year in both revenue and adjusted earnings for the month.” As it seeks to rehabilitate its financials, “the company has made several overtures to advertisers to woo them back.”

Of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers, more than 70 whose contracts predate Musk’s takeover had reduced spend on the platform as of the week that ended February 25, according to Pathmatics, a division of Sensor Tower. Musk initiated cuts of his own, whittling a staff of 8,000 down to 2,000 by the end of 2022.

Some of the banks that lent Musk the $13 billion to complete the purchase of Twitter — including Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Barclays PLC — “haven’t been able to sell that debt to third-party investors, a common practice when banks help finance major buyouts,” WSJ reports.

Some of Twitter’s loans carry “interest rates as high as 15 percent,” according to Business Insider.