The world’s second richest man has been having a really “painful” time running Twitter, the once-handy and dare I say functional social media platform that has become completely unusable since his takeover.
Elon Musk also admitted that he only went through with the $44 billion purchase because a judge was about to force him to buy it.
In a wide-ranging interview with BBC, the billionaire addressed a number of issues that have been plaguing his image and his social media platform in recent months as he’s instituted mass layoffs and claimed he’s wiping the website of bots and fake news, while deplatforming journalists and trusted media organizations.
The interview was held on Twitter Spaces with the BBC, a news outlet that Twitter recently slapped with a “government funded media” label, a term carrying connotations that are better suited to media entities that espouse the views of their government, like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua. Twitter attached the same label to NPR’s account, and the public media outlet has since stopped posting or using Twitter in response.
As he did with NPR, Musk told the BBC that he’s mulling changing the label to “publicly funded,” which he actually did in the BBC’s case a few hours after the interview. “But the new label was still linking through to a page with information about government and state-affiliated media,” the BBC’s noted.
Musk didn’t outright say he regretted buying Twitter, but he complained about how hard it is to run and said he’d be willing to sell if he could find the right buyer. He also lamented that he sometimes has to sleep at the office on a couch in the library “that nobody goes to” because he’s working so hard. The horror.
“It’s not been boring. It has been quite a rollercoaster… It’s been really quite a stressful situation,” he said.
He also had this empathetic response to questions about why he went through with mass layoffs at the company.
“I wouldn’t say it was uncaring… If the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job.”
Billionaires, they’re just like us.
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