As it awaits the finalization of Elon Musk’s acquisition, Twitter reached 229 million users as of the end of the first quarter, with revenue and earnings per share both exceeding Wall Street estimates.
Revenue rose 16% from the year ago period to $1.2 billion. Advertising made up $1.1 billion of that. Earnings per share totaled 61 cents, compared with 8 cents a year ago.
The company reported results before the start of the trading day, but will not convene a conference call because of the pending acquisition of the company. Also related to Musk’s arrival on the scene, Twitter said in its earnings release that it “will not be providing any forward looking guidance, and are withdrawing all previously provided goals and outlook.”
The $44 billion Musk deal is expected to close later this year. If it goes through, Twitter will become a privately held company. The privatization, Musk has said, is a key element in enabling improvements to Twitter to occur.
Along with the financials, the company also issued a restatement of its “monetizable daily active users,” or MDAU, from 2019 to 2021. “In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts,” the company explained. “An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from Q1’19 through Q4’21.”
The correct tally for global users as of the fourth quarter of 2021 was 216.6 million, a difference of 1.9 million from what had previously been reported.
