Twitter Inc. CEO Elon Musk opened up on a whole bunch of issues in a lengthy interview for the media, agreeing to sit for the chat in the company's offices in San Francisco at just 20 minutes' notice. When asked why he agreed to talk, he quipped, "Spontaneity… and there's a lot going on."
‘A Rollercoaster’
Weighing in on his time as CEO of Twitter after purchasing it on October 27, 2022 for $44 billion, Musk said:
"It's not been boring. It's been quite a rollercoaster."
Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of the social media company on April 14, 2022, and up until October, when the purchase was finally made official, there had been a great deal of turbulence and back-and-forth linked to the deal.
When asked about his decision to buy Twitter, including why he almost pulled out of the deal, but then recommitted to acquiring the microblogging site, and whether it had to do with the ruling of a court judge, Musk responded:
"Yes, that is the reason."
Musk attempted to back out of the Twitter deal over the summer of 2022, claiming that the company had failed to furnish information he had demanded about bots, or automated accounts, on the site. A Delaware chancery judge gave Musk until the end of October 2022 to finalize the deal, or face a Twitter lawsuit against him for trying to back out.
On his first impressions of Twitter, Musk laughs and recalls that he thought it was a "really nice office building." However, he added, the company was "spending money like it's going out of fashion."
According to Elon Musk, the financial situation of the company when he bought it was such that there was a negative cash flow situation. It was being run "really like a non-profit," is how Musk described it.
The billionaire businessman, who is also the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, said that it was this cash situation that prompted him to take "drastic action" and lay off staff when he took over the social media company, which, in his opinion, had "four months to live." Musk said Twitter has around 1,500 employees now, a significant drop from about 7,000 before his acquisition.
The tech guru acknowledged in the interview, which was broadcast live on Twitter Spaces and drew over three million listeners, that he was forced to sell stocks and shares he owned to buy Twitter.
Elon Musk made a great many divisive decisions when he took over Twitter, from the staff cull to suspending several journalists' accounts, while restoring previously banned accounts, such as those of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene. When asked about the advertisers who left Twitter since he took over, Musk said the social media company was "roughly breaking even," as most of its advertisers have returned. There was a decline in advertising after his takeover, with giants like Volkswagen and General Motors advising their brands to pause paid advertising on Twitter.
Now, the CEO of Twitter added, everything is going "reasonably well," usage is up, and "the site works." The billionaire conceded, however, that there have been occasional glitches, such as outages on the site, but which have not been protracted.
22 January 2023, 12:58 GMT
'Headed to a Good Place'
Looking back, Elon Musk summed up the Twitter buyout saga, saying that the "pain level has been extremely high, this hasn't been some kind of party." He added it had been "really quite a stressful situation over the last several months," but he was convinced that buying the company was the correct move.
"Were there many mistakes made along the way? Of course. But all's well that ends well, I feel like we're headed to a good place," Musk said.
As for what the media has been writing about him, the billionaire admitted laughingly his "odd" relationship with it, describing it as "love-hate, perhaps more hate."
"The media is able to trash me on a regular basis in the US and the UK," he said.
At some point in the interview, Elon Musk reminded the host slyly that he was "no longer the CEO of Twitter." When asked who was, Musk said his pet dog Floki, a Shiba Inu, was the CEO.