(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. was on course for $3 billion of negative cash flow before he stepped in to stem losses by dismissing more than half the company’s staff.

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“That is why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” Musk said during a Twitter Spaces event late Tuesday. “This company is like, basically, you are in a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.”

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, partly financing the deal with almost $13 billion of debt with interest repayments of around $1.5 billion a year. He has since embarked on a frenzied mission to revamp the social-media platform, which he has said is at risk of going bankrupt and was losing $4 million a day as of early November. The mercurial entrepreneur has overseen the firings or departures of roughly 5,000 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and instituted a “hardcore” work environment for those remaining.

Over the weekend Musk conducted a straw poll on Twitter asking people if they wanted him to resign as the company’s top executive. About 58% of respondents said yes and Musk has since confirmed he’d step down once an appropriate replacement was found, for a job he’s said anyone would be “foolish” to take.

In the Twitter Spaces event, Musk painted a dire picture of the company’s finances but suggested that he has managed to avert a total meltdown.

Twitter’s costs in 2021 totaled almost $5.6 billion, according to the company’s last public annual report. Musk said the company was on track to spend about $5 billion next year. Taken with the debt payments required as a result of the acquisition, Twitter would be looking at about $6.5 billion in expenses in 2023, prompting Musk’s drastic moves to slash costs.