Musk, the bombastic leader of the social media site, hailed the changes he has made since buying the site in October and laying off more than two-thirds of the staff. The layoffs, he said, were “not fun at all … painful.” Musk said Twitter is down to about 1,500 staffers, from more than 7,000. Musk also acknowledged problems, such as shutting down a Twitter data center, leading to troubles with the company’s servers.
“It was quite catastrophic,” Musk said, and Twitter rushed to restore it.
He called out Twitter’s open-sourcing of its recommendation algorithm, the site’s emphasis on video, and its resilience in the face of vast transformation. He said Twitter is breaking roughly even from a financial standpoint, that advertisers were returning to the site, and Twitter usage and growth are satisfactory.
“Many have predicted Twitter will cease to function,” Musk said. “Their predictions have not come true … We’re literally on Twitter now.”
The billionaire made the comments in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night over the company’s live audio feature, Twitter Spaces. In the interview, Musk said Twitter would tweak a new label Twitter has added to accounts including NPR and the BBC referring to them as state-affiliated media — highlighting instead their reliance on public funding.
But Musk also contested that misinformation is more prevalent on the site, after the journalist was unable to name a specific example of the phenomenon.
“You said you see more hateful content but you can’t even name a single one,” Musk said, his tone growing agitated. “You just lied!”
The two continued in a back-and-forth.
“Give me one example! You literally can’t name one,” he said. “You literally said you experience more hateful content and then couldn’t name a single example, that’s absurd.”
The topic shifted to covid.
“Covid is no longer an issue,” Musk said.
As the interview went on, Musk — who appeared in a jovial mood — made repeated jokes including innuendo about Twitter’s name, and the idea of his dog running the company. Musk, who agreed to step down in December after a nonscientific Twitter poll declared he should, said he had abided by that pledge (because his dog is in charge.)
“I did stand down,” he said. “I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.”
Musk also laid out his rules for avoiding Twitter controversies.
He said he probably shoudn’t tweet after 2 or 3 a.m. And he acknowledged the controversies his tweets have invited.
“Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times?” he asked. “Yeah. I need bullet proof shoes at this point.”
Musk said Twitter had sought to turn one of its buildings, which is now vacant, into a homeless shelter, but was turned down by the property manager of Twitter’s San Francisco office.
Meanwhile, Musk appeared to confirm a news report that Twitter was accumulating powerful computing hardware to pursue generative artificial intelligence, the field that has developed large language models such as ChatGPT.
