Elon Musk said Twitter's cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load.

"Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else," Musk said in a tweet early on Saturday.

After Musk acquired Twitter in October, the social media firm faced months of chaos, including layoffs of thousands of employees, criticism over lax content moderation, and an exodus of many advertisers who did not want their ads appearing next to inappropriate content.

Musk's hiring of Linda Yaccarino, former ad chief at Comcast's NBCUniversal as CEO, signaled that ad sales remained a priority for Twitter even as it works to increase subscription revenue. Yaccarino started working at Twitter in early June.

On Thursday, Twitter said that select content creators will be eligible to get a part of the ad revenue the company earns in an attempt to draw more content creators to the site.

(Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu in Bengaluru; editing by Grant McCool)