Twitter, which has been in turmoil since its much-publicised takeover in October last year, appears to be on a growth path.

That's what CEO Elon Musk said during an interview with the BBC broadcast live on Wednesday. Musk also justified his aggressive cost-cutting efforts, which, he said, have started bearing fruit after massive layoffs.

The social media company is “roughly breaking even,” as most of its advertisers have returned, the CEO said. According to Musk, Twitter has about 1,500 employees now, a sharp decline from “just under 8,000 staff members” it had before he took it over in October.

Twitter has been embroiled in chaos and uncertainty since the US$44 billion acquisition by Musk, as its layoffs have also included many engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages.

On top of all this trouble, Twitter suffered a bug that prevented thousands of users from accessing links, its sixth major outage since the beginning of the year, according to Internet watchdog group NetBlocks.

Musk acknowledged some glitches, including recent outages, but said they have not lasted very long. He justified the drastic measures by saying steps were taken to bail out Twitter, which was in a US$3 billion negative cash flow situation.

“We could be cash flow positive this quarter if things go well,” he said in the interview that attracted more than three million listeners, adding that the company currently has all-time high user numbers.

Twitter has been hit by a massive decline in advertising since its acquisition.

Musk, who also runs electronic car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, said that he has no one in mind to succeed him as Twitter's chief executive.

The billionaire magnate, who has faced flak from Tesla investors about the amount of time he spends running the social media platform, had earlier contemplated relinquishing CEO's post and said the end of the year would be a “good timing” to find someone to replace him.