Latest Breaking News On - Living on twitter - Page 1 : vimarsana.com
do you accept there are lots of engineers that are looking at the way twitter is built, and the lack of engineers, because so many have left, and are worried about the health of twitter? well, i mean, there have been... many of these people have predicted that twitter will cease to function. their predictions have not turned out to be true. you know, insert mark twain saying, "rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated." let's go back six months. i mean, we are literally on twitter right now. so it must work. let's go back six months and even further back than that. when you put that initial bid in, you then had a wobble. you kind of said, "i actually don't want to buy twitter any more." it really is quite entertaining, like a soap opera,
the company is going to go bankrupt if we do not cut costs immediately. this is not a caring—uncaring situation. if the whole ship sinks, then nobody�*s got a job. right. but a lot of people just lost theirjobs like that. and they didn't even know they'd lost theirjobs, often. they were just frozen out of their accounts. so, let me ask you, what would you do? well, you might want to give someone some notice. by the way, i'm not running twitter. i know. this is the criticism, and this is what staff members say. a little bit of notice... no, i understand. if you have four months to live, 120 days, in 120 days, you're dead. so what do you want to do? how much are you worth? i don't know. we're talking about around the $200 billion mark. you are framing it like it had a few months to live. you are quite a rich man.
how would you feel? it was pretty intense, you know? you also had to borrow quite a lot of money and pay interest on that too. that was why it was a $3 billion loan rate. in rough numbers, a normal year twitter would do $4.5 billion in revenue, $4.5 billion in cost. it was kind of like a nonprofit and they'd run it at roughly break even. but that is not bankruptcy. you're not saving that company from bankruptcy if it is breaking even. but then the issue is that if you then add half a billion dollars of debt servicing and have a massive drop in revenue, which we did, which is partly cyclic and partly political concerns and whatever, so revenue dropped by over a third, notjust twitter, you know, facebook and google also saw significant advertising revenue declines. it's been a little higher on twitter, but a lot of the advertisers are coming back,
well... i thought, "wow, this is a really nice office building." expensive? yes, a very expensive office building. great decor. it is a lovely place. and definitely spending money like it is going out of fashion, and it isn't quite going out of fashion yet. the gravity of the situation is perhaps not too well understood of, you know, at the point where the company, the transaction closed, twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year, and had i billion in the bank, so that is four months to death, so that is the starting position.
of you having an opinion? for example, tesla has major connections in china. you would not have a certain opinion on something or feel uncomfortable about saying something because of your other business interests elsewhere? do i look uncomfortable? actually, i do, i was trying to look uncomfortable. tesla has got activities around the world and so does spacex, and once in awhile those things do come into conflict. but it is not like twitter, you know, operates in china. it doesn't, it was banned in china. certainly, i have received no communication whatsoever from the chinese government with regard to twitter. in terms of advertising, twitter is not a private company any more, so we don't really know how it's all going. have all the advertisers come back? not all, but most. you can see it for yourself on twitter, even in the for you feed.
because when i first made the offer the response was the board had offered a poison pill, so they were like, "hell no, you can't buy twitter, we'd rather die." "we'll, like, chew on cyanide before being bought," that was their initial response. and then you said, "actually i don't want to buy it..." and then they said, "no, you must buy us," gun to the head, "you have to buy us." i'm like, "are you the same people who said you would rather die than be bought?" doesn't that seem odd? so, i guess my question to you is, you said that the reason was because of bots, because twitter was filled with bots. looking back at it now, was there a little bit of you that thought, "actually, maybe i've overpaid and actually maybe i don't want to do this, i want to get out of this?" be honest.
interesting. so you didn't, you didn't actually want to purchase it, even when you said you were going to? well, not at that price. i think the analogy is pretty close. there is a warehouse full of goods. they say less than 5% of what's in the warehouse is broken, but then you walk into the warehouse and you see actually it is 25%. so you may still want to buy what is in that warehouse, but probably at a lower price. not buying the stuff that is broken. so you didn't have an epiphany. you just thought, "i'm going to have to buy this, i might as well bite the bullet?" yeah. it is not super complicated. i'm not sure you have said that before. cue a whole bunch of court cases. "you said this in the bbc interview, blah—blah, etc." you then came into twitter with a sink. what were your first impressions?
two were connected? well, people couldn't parse the difference me selling because i lost faith in tesla, which i haven't, or because it was desperately needed for twitter. and after that, after you let go of a lot of staff, twitter became slimmed down a lot, then you started making a lot of policy decisions, and one of that was to bring donald trump back. he hasn't actually tweeted yet. do you expect him to come back at any point, have you spoken to him? i haven't spoken to him. he may or may not come back. but the point is that twitter should be a town square that gives equal voice to the whole country, and ideally the whole world. it should not be a partisan politics, and moreover partisan politics that are on the very far—left of the spectrum. san francisco politics is normally quite niche but twitter effectively acted as a megaphone for very niche regional politics and megaphoned
usage is dramatically less, so... but the results speak for themselves. the system, despite being at all—time highs of usage is fast. it is more responsive than it was before the takeover, and we have also added longform tweets. we've added... you can now post videos up to two hours, soon videos of any length. we are rolling out our subscriber programme so that people can, content creators can actually make a living on twitter by having some of their content behind a pay wall. and we've open—sourced the algorithm so there is transparency about what tweets get shown, what content gets shown versus not. i think, what are you really going to trust? do you trust some black box algorithm from some other site, or are you going to trust the thing you can see and understand?
who were previously banned for spreading things like qanon conspiracies. you had people like andrew tate who were brought back, who were previously banned for things hate speech. do you think you prioritise freedom of speech over misinformation and hate speech? well, who is to say that something is misinformation? who is the arbiter of that? is it the bbc? are you literally asking me? you are the arbiter on twitter, because you own twitter. i'm saying, who is to say? one person's misinformation is another person's information. the point at which you say, "this is misinformation..." but you accept misinformation can be dangerous, that it can cause real—world harms, that it can potentially cause... the point i'm trying to make is that the bbc itself has at times published things that are false. do you agree that has occurred? i am quite sure the bbc had said things that have turned out not