Elon Musk Says Running Twitter Has Been ‘Quite Painful’
Elon Musk says running Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster” for him since the October acquisition of the company. Musk, 51, told BBC that he’s had some regrets…
Elon Musk leaves the Phillip Burton Federal Building on January 24, 2023 in San Francisco, California. Musk testified at a trial regarding a lawsuit that has investors suing Tesla and Musk over his August 2018 tweets saying he was taking Tesla private with funding that he had secured. The tweet was found to be false and cost shareholders billions of dollars when Tesla’s stock price began to fluctuate wildly allegedly based on the tweet.
Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesElon Musk says running Twitter has been "quite painful" and "a rollercoaster" for him since the October acquisition of the company. Musk, 51, told BBC that he's had some regrets about how he's run the social media site.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said the "pain level has been extremely high. This hasn't been some sort of party." Though he hasn't been "bored," Musk admits it's "really quite a stressful situation." Despite all the drama surrounding the company -- from massive layoffs to his work habits -- he still felt buying Twitter was the right thing to do.
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Discussing Twitter's finances, Musk said the company is now "roughly breaking even," as most of its advertisers have returned. To help him achieve that, Musk cut the workforce from just under 8,000 to about 1,500. "It's not fun at all. Painful," Musk said of the firing. He added that it was one of the hardest things he had to do. He claimed that the cuts were to prevent the company from going bankrupt. "If all ships sink, then nobody's got a job," he said.
The exit of many of Twitter's engineers since Musk bought the company has raised concerns about the stability of the platform. He acknowledged some glitches, including outages on the site, but he said the outages have not been for very long.
Elsewhere in the interview, Musk addressed the hate speech and misinformation spread on the social site. He claimed that there was less misinformation since the takeover. Meanwhile, his efforts to delete bots should decrease fake news. However, studies have been conducted to prove engagement with popular misinformation-spreading accounts spiked after his takeover.
He also addressed his sometimes controversial tweets saying, "Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times? Yes." Musk jokingly added, "I think I should not tweet after 3 a.m. If you're going to tweet something that maybe is controversial, save it as a draft and look at it the next day. See if you still want to tweet it."
On the issue of legacy-verified blue checks on the platform, Musk said they would be removed from accounts by the end of next week.
