Earlier this morning, Elon Musk sat down for an impromptu 90-minute talk with BBC North America Tech reporter James Clayton to discuss the chaotic first six months of his ownership of Twitter.
Within moments, Musk stated that the BBC would no longer be labelled “state-affiliated media”. There were plenty of other revelations over the course of the chat, which was also broadcast on Twitter Spaces.
Here are some of the more eyebrow-raising points.
He bought Twitter only because he thought a judge would make him
Last year, Elon Musk stated he wouldn’t be buying Twitter for the agreed $44 billion (£35bn), claiming that the site was full of bots. He eventually went through with the purchase, just as Twitter was taking him to court for trying to cancel the deal.
Musk, who also runs car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, repeated his claims about fake accounts during Wednesday’s interview in quite strong terms. “Let’s say you buy a warehouse full of goods, and you’re told that less than 5 per cent of the goods in the warehouse are broken,” he said. “But then you actually get to the warehouse and find 25 per cent of goods are broken — you’re like: ‘huh, that’s not what you said.’”
That explains the cold feet, but not the eventual purchase. “Did you do that because you thought that a court would make you do that?” asked Clayton. “Yes,” replied Musk, laughing. “Yes, that is the reason.”
When pressed on whether he wanted to buy the site at all, his response was revealing: “Well, not at that price.”
Analysis: This is what plenty of people assumed at the time, but something that Musk himself had not acknowledged until now.
Given even Musk accepts that the site is worth half that now, it seems he acknowledges that he paid significantly over the odds.
…But he claims he wouldn’t sell it today even if offered $44bn
“Someone comes in and offers you $44 billion for Twitter right now, would you take it?” asked Clayton, later in the interview. “No,” replied Musk after a long pause.
He then clarified that it “depends on who” the theoretical buyer is. “If I was confident that they would rigorously pursue the truth, then I guess I would be glad to hand it over to someone else.”
When he added that he didn’t care about the money, Clayton pointed out that, as one of the world’s richest men, he could just give it away to someone he trusted. Musk deflected this by asking who should run Twitter, before adding: “It’s a hard job.”
Analysis: While nobody can know what’s going on inside Musk’s head, this answer will raise a few eyebrows. Given he acknowledges he overpaid for the platform and that he didn’t want to have to sell valuable Tesla shares to do so, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t treat such an offer as a handy ‘rewind’ button.
Twitter has slashed 81% of its workforce
Twitter’s workforce has been shrinking since the day Musk bought it, but confirmed figures have been hard to come by. According to Musk, when he joined there were “just under 8,000” staff members and now the number is at the 1,500 mark. That’s a drop of 81 per cent.
How difficult is it to cope with such a sudden drop in person-power? It’s “not fun at all”, Musk said. He added that it can be “painful.” And no, he didn’t fire all of those people personally. “It’s not possible to talk with that many people face to face.”
Analysis: That’s fewer remaining employees than suggested by most external estimates, with the New York Times putting it around the 1,800 mark in February. Notably, this doesn’t include contractors — where an estimated 4,400 of its original 5,500 have been let go, mainly in content moderation.
Blue ticks will be gone by next week
Blue ticks — the way of verifying whether Twitter users’ identities — will become a paid feature from next week, Musk said.
That means that anybody with a blue tick from the old regime (celebrities, athletes, journalists and other noteworthy types) will lose them if they don’t pay up. This will possibly pave the way for a wave of impersonation.
Analysis: We’ll see. This was originally supposed to happen at the start of the month, and then didn’t.
The company needs to be careful, though. The introduction of paid-for verification resulted in a fake Nintendo account sharing a swearing Mario, and made a US pharmaceutical company’s shares plummet with false offers of free insulin.
He doesn’t believe hate speech and misinformation have increased
When asked about hate speech, Musk went on the offensive, asking Clayton to give specific examples. When he couldn’t, Musk refused to engage with the premise of the question.
“Then I say, sir, that you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You can’t name a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet, and yet you claimed hateful content was high. That’s false.”
He also stated that he thought misinformation was declining because of a reduction in bots. Obviously not all misinformation spreading is automated, though.
Analysis: Asking for specific examples is an effective gotcha in an interview — it immediately puts the person asking difficult questions on the backfoot. Even if Clayton had given an example, the line between unpleasant trolling and hate speech is extremely poorly defined and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.
However, organisations from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate to Amnesty International agree that hate speech is surging on the platform. That conclusion is extremely plausible, given the job cuts in content moderation and Musk’s commitment to free speech including reinstating accounts of those previously banned for hateful conduct.
He regrets some of his tweets
When asked about his own unintended spread of misinformation — the tweet promoting a conspiracy theory about the husband of Nancy Pelosi — Musk accepted that some of his tweets were poorly judged.
"Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times? Yes. I need bullet-proof shoes at this point.”
But does he have more responsibility to think twice before tweeting, now that he’s in charge? "I think I should not tweet after 3am, or maybe 2am," Musk responded.
Analysis: Musk deleted the Pelosi tweet pretty quickly. But generally, you get the impression that, like Donald Trump, he enjoys the instant response generated by a controversial tweet, be it a meme or a political statement. Indeed, for a time his tweets were algorithmically amplified, allegedly to ensure more people saw his tweets than Joe Biden’s.
Musk didn’t vote for Donald Trump
Musk’s politics have become a lot more public since purchasing Twitter. Plenty of the people he interacts with regularly on the site are extremely pro-Trump.
Despite this, and encouraging his followers to vote Republican in the mid-term elections, Musk says he didn’t actually vote for the former US president.
"Definitely close to half the country voted for Trump," he said. "I wasn’t one of them, I voted for Biden."
Analysis: Before the 2020 election, Musk was flirting with voting Republican, and Trump himself has claimed that Musk gave him his vote. But then the former president’s casual relationship with facts is the reason Twitter introduced fact-checking in the first place, so who knows?
He doesn’t take interviews entirely seriously
As you might expect for the kind of eccentric CEO who ensured that the press email address automatically replies with the poop emoji, Musk didn’t always treat the exchange entirely seriously.
Not only did he twice insist that his dog, Floki, was the CEO of Twitter, but he also, after opening the floor to comments from listeners, spent a good while trying to persuade Clayton to say he “loved BBC”. This is an acronym used in the online porn community, and very different from the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Analysis: Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who built his love of Twitter on memes, Musk clearly likes to troll in real life. What’s surprising is how he veered from serious topics to frivolous asides — perhaps a side effect of co-hosting the chat on Twitter Spaces, rather than dropping by a BBC studio.
