Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the social media company is "roughly breaking even," as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have started bearing fruit after massive layoffs.

Mr Musk, in an interview with BBC broadcast live on Twitter Spaces, said 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 marked by chaos and uncertainty since the $44bn (€40bn) acquisition by Mr Musk, as its layoffs have also included many engineers responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.

Last week, 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.

Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, including recent outages, but said they have not lasted very long.

He says Twitter was in a $3bn negative cash flow situation and had to take drastic actions, referring to its large-scale layoffs.

"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 the company currently has all-time high user numbers.

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

Mr Musk had said that was due to the cyclical nature of ad spending and some of which was "political". He said most of its advertisers have returned.

The billionaire, who also runs electric car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, said he has no one in mind to succeed him as Twitter chief executive.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, said that it would offer up to $20,000 to users reporting vulnerabilities in its artificial intelligence systems.

OpenAI Bug Bounty program, which went live on Tuesday, will offer rewards to people based on the severity of the bugs they report, with rewards starting from $200 per vulnerability.

Technology companies often use bug bounty programs to encourage programmers and ethical hackers to report bugs in their software systems.

The program does not include incorrect or malicious content produced by OpenAI systems.