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In an apparently spontaneous live interview with the BBC on Twitter Spaces yesterday, Elon Musk has spoken about his chaotic takeover of Twitter, revealing all kinds of insights about running the social media platform (like the fact he sleeps on a couch in the office and his dog is the CEO) and his decision to buy it.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.In the cringe-riddled interview, Musk touched on the hugely controversial lay-offs that has resulted in Twitter sacking around 80 percent of its staff. He also called running Twitter “quite painful,” adding “It’s been really quite a stressful situation, over the last several months. Not an easy one.”
"Were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course," he continued.
However, he defended the decision to make the large-scale job cuts, saying Twitter had “four months to live” when he bought it and had few options left on the table.
“This is not a caring/uncaring situation. It’s like, if the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job,” Musk said.
He then dodged a question from the BBC's James Clayton asking whether he could use his status as the planet's richest human to support the company.
The interview was interlaced with numerous jokes that played to Musk's loyal hoards of followers. One gem included him saying: “I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.”
Musk also stated that he was essentially forced to buy Twitter. He claimed he initially wanted to buy Twitter for a certain price, but then found more automated bots on the network than he expected, so he asked for a lower price. By this point, however, the ball was rolling and he had to complete the deal due to legal challenges.
He later said in the conversation that he wouldn't sell the company though, even if offered what he had paid for the company.
The chat took a confrontational turn when Musk was asked whether his lax approach to censorship could result in more hate speech and misinformation. Musk demanded Clayton cite an example, which he couldn't do on the spot. “You said you see more hateful content, but you can’t even name a single one,” Musk said. “You just lied!”
Musk then brought up the BBC's COVID reporting and alleged pressure from the British government to change editorial policy. The BBC is one of a few media companies that had been labeled by Musk's Twitter as "state-affiliated media". Due to being incorrect, this was changed to "government-funded media", which, for the BBC at least, has now been changed to "publicly funded". NPR, which has a small fraction of its funding from the US government has left Twitter after being labeled government-funded, claiming it was misleading.
No doubt looking to silence some critics, Musk suggested that Twitter was now on the up and the company is "roughly" breaking even.
Many of the claims in the interview, such as Twitter’s financial fortunes, have been hard to independently verify. But then again, as Musk said himself: “One person’s misinformation is another person’s information.”
