Owning Twitter has been painful, company roughly breaking even: Elon Musk

Asked if he regrets buying Twitter, Musk said the “pain level has been extremely high; this hasn’t been some kind of party”.

“Were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course. But all’s well that ends well, I feel like we’re headed to a good place,” he added.

The billionaire also said the microblogging platform has about 1,500 employees now, a sharp decline from over 7,000 workers before his acquisition. Justifying the mass layoffs, Musk said there was “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation” and that Twitter had “four months to live”.

Among other things, Musk also discussed his concerns about the development of artificial intelligence. He said AI had been going for a long time but needed an “easy interface” like chatbot ChatGPT had provided.

“There should be a regulatory body to make sure it doesn’t present a danger to the public,” said Musk, who, along with other experts, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4.

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Musk also reiterated that all legacy verified blue ticks on Twitter will be removed by next week. “Any social media company that doesn’t have paid-for verification will likely incur issues with things like AI,” he added.Earlier in the day, Musk had tweeted that all legacy accounts would be gone by April 20.

The company has been aggressively pushing its Blue subscription in a bid to boost revenue amid a massive decline in advertising.

Analysts at Insider Intelligence said Twitter’s income from advertising will fall by 28% in 2023. They said they were slashing an earlier worldwide revenue estimate of $4.74 billion by more than a third to $2.98 billion as trust in the platform deteriorates.

“The biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business is that advertisers don’t trust Musk,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.

On the US ban looming over TikTok, Musk said he is generally against banning things. “…even though that would help Twitter, I would be generally against banning things”.