Elon Musk Opens Up About 'Painful' Twitter Tenure

Elon Musk admitted his ownership of Twitter has been "quite painful" and "really quite stressful" during an interview with BBC reporter James Clayton.

During the discussion, which was conducted at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, the business mogul claimed his platform is "roughly breaking even," after slashing its headcount from 8,000 to around 1,500.

Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 in a $44 billion takeover deal, vowing to restore "free speech" on one of the world's biggest social media platforms. Following the purchase, and changes to Twitter's content moderation policy, a number of prominent companies stopped advertising on the website, which also suffered from a wave of impersonation after allowing accounts to buy its blue tick verification marker.

Describing his time running Twitter Musk said: "It's not been boring. It's been quite a rollercoaster."

He added the "pain level has been extremely high, this hasn't been some kind of party," and that he'd faced "really quite a stressful situation over the last several months."

However Musk insisted the company is now doing "reasonably well" and is "roughly breaking even," with many of its advertisers having returned following their original departures.

Newsweek has contacted Twitter by email to ask for more details on which advertisers had returned, to which it responded with a poo emoji, as it does to all emailed media inquiries.

Musk said that he "sometimes sleep in the office" because of his workload, and has a favored couch in the building's library which he uses for this purpose.

Asked about his personal controversial tweets, which included promoting a discredited conspiracy theory about an attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband within days of becoming Twitter CEO, Musk replied: "Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times? Yes. I think I should not tweet after 3 a.m."

Musk added that all legacy verified blue ticks will be removed by the end of next week, meaning only Twitter blue subscribers will have the icon by their name.

Analysis from NewsGuard found that between March 1 and March 3 25 "misinformation superspreaders" on Twitter, each of which with at least 50,000 followers, had blue tick-verified accounts.

Following the interview Musk tweeted: "I said BBC could come Twitter, then, to my surprise, a reporter shows up."

He also shared a four-minute clip in which he challenges the BBC's Clayton to name "a single example" of hate speech on Twitter since his takeover, to which the reporter replied: "I don't actually use that feed anymore because I don't particularly like it," referring to Twitter.