LONDON: Elon Musk has said that running Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster”.
The multi-billionaire entrepreneur said he would sell the company if the right person came along.
Musk, who runs car maker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44bn in October.
He participated in an interview on Twitter Spaces, which attracted more than three million listeners. Asked whether he regretted buying Twitter, Musk said the “pain level has been high, and this has not been some kind of party”.
Musk said about his time at Twitter: “It’s not been boring. It’s been quite a rollercoaster.”
He added that it has been “really quite a stressful condition over the last several months, ” but said he still felt buying the company was the right thing to do. He said that things are going “reasonably well”, stating that usage of the site is up and “the site works”. He said that the workload means “I sometimes sleep in the office”, adding that he has a spot on a couch in the library “that no one goes to”.
Asked about the decision to add the label to the BBC’s major Twitter account, describing it as “government-funded media”, Musk said: “I know the BBC is normally not thrilled about being labelled state media.”
Discussing Twitter’s finances, Musk said the company is now “roughly breaking even” as most of its advertisers have returned.
He said cutting the employees from just under 8,000 at the time he bought the firm to about 1,500 hadn’t been easy. The exit of several engineers since Musk bought the company has increased concerns about the platform’s stability.
He acknowledged a few glitches and also included outages on the site. But he said the outages haven’t been long, and the site works fine. On the problem of legacy verified blue ticks on the platform, Musk said they would be removed from accounts by the end of next week.
“I do actually have much respect for the BBC,” Musk added, stating that the interview was “a good opportunity to ask few questions” and “to get few feedback on what we should be doing different”.
Musk has an estimated personal fortune of almost 190bn dollars, making him the world’s second richest person, according to the Forbes billionaires list.
