Owning Twitter quite painful: Elon Musk

International

oi-Deepika S

Elon Musk has said that running Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion in October last year, has been quite painful and a rollercoaster.

In an exclusive interview with BBC, Musk opened up about the controversial acquisition of the platform in October 2022, the mass layoffs of staff to how the company handles misinformation.

The Tesla CEO the situation has been quite stressful over the last several months but added that buying the company was the right thing to do.

“The pain level has been extremely high, this hasn’t been some kind of party,” Musk said in a Twitter Spaces interaction with BBC.

Musk on BBC-Twitter row

Responding to the BBC-Twitter row, Musk said, the social media site will update the BBC’s government-funded media tag after the broadcaster objected to the label.

“We want it as truthful and accurate as possible – we’re adjusting the label to [the BBC being] publicly funded – we’ll try to be accurate.”

Musk clarified that he had a lot of respect for the BBC and added the interview was intended to get some feedback on what we should be doing differently.

Objecting to Twitter’s move, the taxpayer-funded licence fee-supported UK media corporation said it had contacted the social media giant over the designation on its @BBC account to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

“The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee,” the BBC statement said. The broadcaster account has 2.2 million followers.

Musk on layoffs

Commenting on the layoff process, the CEO claimed that the whole experience was “not fun at all” and can at times be painful.

He added that the company had just under 8,000 employees earlier and is now left with 1,500 workers.

Musk also revealed that he sleeps in the office sometimes, adding that his chosen spot is a couch in the office library, where no one goes to.

Speaking about how the company handles misinformation, Musk said that no one can give a solid example of increasing hateful content on Twitter.

“I’m asking for a single example and you can’t name one,” Musk tells the BBC correspondent.

When asked about why Twitter brought changes to its Covid misinformation labels, Musk said, ‘Covid is no longer an issue.’