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., 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.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.