Elon Musk (51) bought Twitter in 2022 for 44 billion US dollars. Since then, the entrepreneur and the short message service have repeatedly made headlines. Musk addresses some of these in a new interview with the BBC’s James Clayton, broadcast via Twitter Spaces. He also jokes about his dog and explains that he sometimes sleeps in the office.
In the interview, Musk describes the time since the takeover and at the helm of Twitter as a “roller coaster”. There have been numerous layoffs in recent months. Before the takeover, a little less than 8,000 people worked at Twitter, today there are still around 1,500 employees. This was “not fun at all” and “painful” for him, but without austerity measures the platform was said to be on the verge of collapse.
It is quite surprising that Musk is speaking to the BBC, given that there has recently been friction between the billionaire and the public broadcaster. Even for himself, it was apparently surprising that a BBC reporter accepted an offer for an interview.
The BBC’s account was recently declared a “state-funded medium” on Twitter, against which the broadcaster protested. The BBC is “independent and always has been”. It is financed by radio license fees. Musk announces that he will change this label to “publicly funded”. The US broadcasting association NPR, which was initially described as “close to the state” and later as “state-funded” on Twitter, has meanwhile decided not to publish any new content on the platform.
In addition, Musk also talks about more private topics in the interview. He jokes that it’s not him but his dog who is the head of Twitter. The entrepreneur also explains that he has “shot himself in the foot” several times with tweets: “I think I shouldn’t tweet after 3 a.m. in the morning.” If you’re going to post something potentially controversial, you might want to save it as a draft first and see if you still want to tweet it the next day. Musk also says he sometimes sleeps in the office – on a couch in a library that nobody goes to.
