There are a couple of exceptions that make the results / trend seem a bit weird, but basically Twitter has been doing well financially in the last 5 years, with the exception of that covid year. They just haven’t been doing as well as the other big tech behemoths and that’s tended to shape the narrative.
The 2021 figures included an
$800m settlement launched in 2016. If not for that, i.e. based on real business performance in that year, they made a substantial profit. The 2020 and 2019 figures start talking about deferred tax assets and intra-entity transfers of intangible assets so I start losing the thread a bit there, but the adjusted net income / loss figures that exclude those things paint a fairly simple picture where Twitter‘s profits in 2018, 2019 and 2021 were in the same range, and the covid hit was big but not catastrophic. They were
less affected by Apple’s changes than Facebook or TikTok too, and it posted over $500m in profit in Q1
this year.
It’s obviously vulnerable to the mood of the ad industry and things like the pandemic, but people have been floating around this idea that it’s this failing company on a road to nowhere, and it needed drastic changes to become a profitable company. The line “failed to post a profit in 8 of the last 10 years” was always brought out, and few people decided to point out the second half of those 10 years were dramatically different to the first half. Hence misleading perceptions form like…
Even though by any reasonable definition, Twitter already was profitable.
Small details like an $800m settlement from a case launched in 2016 don’t tend to make it into those narratives.
2021 results are
here.
2020 results are
here.