- New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has restored the company’s relationship with Google Cloud, reports say.
- She’s restarted paying its bills after Elon Musk halted payments, per Bloomberg and the WSJ.
- Google Cloud was just one of the many companies Twitter had allegedly stopped paying.
Twitter has restarted paying its Google Cloud bills under new CEO Linda Yaccarino after Elon Musk halted payments, according to reports by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.
Platformer first reported earlier this month that Twitter had stopped paying its Google Cloud invoices as part of Musk’s drastic cost-cutting spree. Twitter had signed a multi-year contract with Google in 2018 to host services on its servers including fighting spam and removing child sexual abuse material, per the report.
Sources told Bloomberg that Google had initially struggled to communicate with Musk to discuss the unpaid bills, and had tried to reach him by contacting staff at SpaceX instead.
Yaccarino, who became CEO of the company in early June, helped to restore the relationship and held talks with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. They said that Musk was supportive of the changed relationship.
The companies are also negotiating a broader partnership that could include Google’s advertising spending on Twitter and its use of Twitter’s API, the person added.
Twitter typically pays between $200 million and $300 million a year for Cloud services from Google, sources told Bloomberg.
Google did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, while Twitter replied with its standard automatic response, which did not address Insider’s query.
Since Musk bought Twitter in October, he’s claimed that the social-media company had been on the path to bankruptcy and has drastically pulled back on spending. He chopped Twitter’s workforce in half the week after he took charge, and has been incrementally laying off other staff ever since.
Under Musk’s control, Twitter has also cut back on free food for staff, auctioned off company merchandise and office supplies like industrial pizza ovens and swivel chairs, and tried to bring in more revenues by introducing charges to access some of the site’s services, such as its blue-check verification program.
Google Cloud isn’t the only company Twitter had owed money to. A series of lawsuits allege that Twitter stopped paying bills to a number of companies under Musk’s control. The allegations range from unpaid invoices to marketing companies for branded merchandise to rent for Twitter’s offices, which has led to the company being kicked out of its office in Boulder, Colorado.
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