But you never know with elon musk. Theres a lot going on, so i thought this might be a Good Opportunity to answer some questions and maybe get some feedback, too. What should we be doing different . I know the bbc, for example, was not thrilled about being labelled state affiliated media. N ot exa ctly. I was going to get that later, but lets go for it now. It has officially objected to that term. Do you want to respond to it . Yeah, yeah. Our goal is simply to be as truthful and accurate as possible, so i think we are adjusting the label to be publicly funded, which i think is perhaps not too objectionable. Were trying to be accurate. I am not the bbc, but. Publicly funded is how the bbc describes itself. So, that would be accurate. If we use the same words that the bbc uses to describe itself, that, presumably, would be ok. I am not asking you for a yes or no, because you are not running the bbc per se, but it seems to pass a reasonability test. So youre going to change those labels on the bbc twitter feed, and also nprs as well . Yeah. Publicly funded. Basically, we are trying to be as accurate as possible. All right, fine. First of all, i just want to clear something up. Are you sleeping in the office, here . I sometimes sleep in the office. Like, five days a week . Three days a week . Im not here five days a week. There is a library that nobody goes to, on the seventh floor, and there is a couch there and i sleep there sometimes. 0k, 0k. In terms of the general overview, the reason why you have agreed to do this is because you wanted to talk about the First Six Months as Chief Executive Owner of twitter. Yeah, its kind of like, whatever you want to talk about, you know . So, how do you think it has gone . Well, it has not been boring. It has been quite a roller coaster, so. Things are going, i think, reasonably well. We are seeing some all time highs in terms of total user time. So we passed 8 billion user minutes per day, which is a lot of user minutes. So usage is up, growth is good. The site works, mostly. We have had a few glitches here and there, but the site is working fairly well. And were doing it with a small fraction of the original headcount. You mentioned outages there. There have been several, and we have actually spoken to an engineer who works at twitter, and they said that the plumbing is broken here and it is on fire and there could be problems at any minute. Do you accept that . I mean, there have been a few outages, but not for very long. And its currently working fine. It doesnt keep you up at night that twitter might go offline again . At this point weve got a pretty good handle on what makes twitter work, and we are also doing it with two data centres instead of three. So we used to have three data centres, we shut down one of them. We are actually at two thirds of the prior compute capability. Weve made so many improvements to the Core Algorithm and in some cases weve improved the Core Algorithm by 80 , so the actual cpu 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. Weve 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 weve 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 . 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. Lets go back six months. I mean, we are literally on twitter right now. So it must work. Lets 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 dont want to buy twitter any more. It really is quite entertaining, like a soap opera, because when i first made the offer the response was the board had offered a poison pill, so they were like, hell no, you cant buy twitter, wed rather die. Well, like, chew on cyanide before being bought, that was their initial response. And then you said, actually i dont want to buy it. And then they said, no, you must buy us, gun to the head, you have to buy us. Im like, are you the same people who said you would rather die than be bought . Doesnt 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 ive overpaid and actually maybe i dont want to do this, i want to get out of this . Be honest. The problem was that the publicly stated user numbers were in excess of the real user numbers, so. Ive heard you talk about that, but basically, looking back at it now, was that the only reason that you wanted to pull out . Yes. That was literally the issue. Lets say you buy a warehouse full of goods, and you are told that less than 5 of the goods in the warehouse are broken. Then you actually look in the warehouse and it turns out 25 of the thing is broken. You would be like, huh, thats not what you said. So then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. I kind of had to. Did you do that because you thought a court would make you do that . Yes. Right. Yes, that is the reason. So you were still trying to get out of it and you were advised by lawyers, look, youre going to have to buy this. Yes. Interesting. So you didnt, you didnt 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 whats 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 didnt have an epiphany. You just thought, im going to have to buy this, i might as well bite the bullet . Yeah. It is not super complicated. Im 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 . 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 isnt 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. 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 theyd run it at roughly break even. But that is not bankruptcy. Youre 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. Its been a little higher on twitter, but a lot of the advertisers are coming back, so there is a cyclic drop which is still pretty significant, but in rough numbers, revenue dropped from 4. 5 billion to three, and expenses went from 4. 5 to six, creating a 3 billion negative cash flow situation, and twitter having 1 billion in the bank, that is four months to live. So, unless drastic action was taken immediately this company was going to die. Lets talk about that drastic action, because almost immediately you sacked a lot of twitter workers. And i spoke to them, it was very easy to speak to them when it happened, and the way, they said, pretty much everyone said, is it felt quite haphazard and it felt a little bit uncaring. I wouldnt say uncaring. The issue was, like, 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 didnt even know theyd 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, im 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, youre dead. So what do you want to do . How much are you worth . I dont know. Were 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. I sold a lot of tesla stock to close this deal. I did not want to sell the tesla stock. 0k. Do you have any regrets about the way some staff were let go . I mean, people were given three months of severance, in some cases more. So, like i said, Companies Need to run on their own cognizance. And it is not so easy for me to sell stock as people might think. I have to sell stock during certain periods. I cant sell stock during other periods, so there are only brief windows where i can sell tesla stock, and this is often taken as a lack of faith in tester and in fact, the tesla stock sales caused the tesla stock to plummet which was not good. Do you think those two were connected . Well, people couldnt parse the difference me selling because i lost faith in tesla, which i havent, 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 hasnt actually tweeted yet. Do you expect him to come back at any point, have you spoken to him . I havent 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 that to the world. In orderfor something to serve as a digital town square it must, you know, serve all people, from all political persuasions. Provided it is legal. So, close to half the country voted for trump. I wasnt one of them. I voted for biden. But nonetheless, free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you dont like to say things you dont like, otherwise it is irrelevant. And at the point at which you lose free speech, it does not come back. The issue some people have is that a lot of people were brought back, some people were brought back 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. Im saying, who is to say . One persons misinformation is another persons 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 im 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 to be true in its 100 year history. Even if you aspire to be accurate, there are times where you will not be. I think in The Grand Scheme of things the bbc does aspire to be accurate. But you accept there has to be a line in terms of hate speech. Youre not looking at total 100 unrestricted speech . Im generally of the opinion that if the people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it. So, for example, you cannot advocate murdering someone, that is illegal in the United States and probably everywhere, i would expect. So there are limits to speech. Taking your argument to a logical conclusion, then, do you accept there is more misinformation on the platform if it is not being policed in the same way . I actually think there is less these days because we have eliminated so many of the bots which were pushing scams and spam. Previous management turned a blind eye to the bots because their bonuses were tied to user growth, and if your competition is tied to user growth, then youre not going to look too closely at some of the users. That is part of the problem. So i think there is less misinformation because we dont have the bot problem that we used to. We also have given a lot of attention to Community Notes which corrects, the community itself corrects misinformation, and it has been very effective. I would onlyjust add that we have spoken people who have been sacked that used to be in, content moderation and weve spoken to people very recently that have been involved in moderation, and they say there is not enough people to police the stuff particularly around hate speech in the company. What hate speech are you talking about . You use twitter. Have you seen a rise in hate speech . Just your personal anecdote. I dont. Tiktok has also been in the news, and there is talk about the Biden Administration banning it orforcing a sale. What is your view . I dont really use tiktok. One of the reasons i emphasised that our goal here at twitter is to maximise unregretted user minutes and unregretted user time is that i hear many people tell me they spend a lot of time on tiktok but they regret the time spent and that seems like, 0k, well, we dont want to have regretted time. We want the time to be unregretted, where you learned things, you were entertained, amused. Frankly, i think i get more laughs out of twitter than anything else, and many people tell me the same thing so that is a good sign. For tiktok itself, ijust dont know enough about what is going on there. I cant say i have a strong opinion on tiktok. You dont have opinion on whether it should be banned or not . You know, im generally against banning things. So i probably would not be in favour. It would help twitter, i suppose, if tiktok was banned because then people would spend more time on twitter and less time on tiktok, but even though that, even if it would help twitter, i would be generally against the banning of things. Do you feel, sometimes, that your many Business Interests might get in the way 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 doesnt, 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 dont really know how its 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. I mean in the following feed. You should not use for you because it sucks. Filled with hate speech, i am told. Thats not what i said. 0k, fine, well why not use for you . What is wrong with it . How is it going . Is twitter in profit now . No, i would say we are roughly breaking even at this point. And you said before you see a world where it could be in profit. Is there a timeline on that . Depending on how things go, if Current Trends continue i think we could be profitable. To be more precise, we could be cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well. I want to talk about if you have any regrets and, you know, i think you were booed at a Dave Chappelle concert. A little. Some say little, some say a bit more. I think your own lawyer said you couldnt get a fair trial in San Francisco because there are lots of people dont necessarily like you here. I have to say, i was wrong, or he was wrong, i guess, because i was acquitted by a San Franciscojury unanimously, so. Do you have any regrets buying twitter . I think it was something that needed to be done. It has been quite difficult, you know, i would say the pain level of twitter has been extremely high, it hasnt been some sort of party, so it has been really quite a stressful situation for the last several months, not an easy one. Apart from the pain, it has been quite painful, but at the end of the day, it should have been done. Were many mistakes along the way . Of course. But all is well that ends well, and i feel like we are headed to a good place, and we roughly break even, we are trending towards being cash flow positive very soon, literally in a matter of months. The advertisers are returning. I think the quality of recommended tweets has improved significantly, and weve taken a lot of feedback from people that have looked at the open source recommendation algorithm, and weve made a lot of improvements even since that was made open source, and were going to keep doing that, so overall i think the trend is very good so, you know. Can you talk me through the emotional strain of this . Look, i have been under constant attack. It is not like i, you know, have a stone cold heart or Something Like that. I dont turn replies off and i removed my entire block list, so i dont block anyone either. So somebody can. I get, like, a lot of negative feedback but i think it is actually good to get negative feedback. When you talk about the emotional strain and youve gone back to feedback, is that the thing that has been most difficult to take, the sort of negative feedback . If the media is running nonstop stories about why you are a horrible person, it is hurtful. 0bviously. Hello there. High pressure is continuing to bring a lot of dry, settled, sunny weather throughout the day for most areas on thursday, but like the last few days, weve got a keen easterly wind out there. Thats taking the edge off. The temperatures will be noticeably chilly along north sea coasts and there will be some rain at times and more cloud across South East England courtesy of this weather front, which will move in off the near continent. Youll notice theres a slight blue hue to the air mass, indicating that the air is quite chilly as well. So when you factor in the strong wind and slightly cooler air, then it will be a little bit fresher across the board. However, most places starting off dry, widespread sunshine and much of the country will stay dry and sunny all day. But then well see that area of cloud and some splashes of rain pushing into east anglia In The South East during the afternoon. Its here where the winds will be quite gusty as well. So with a lack of sunshine here and the gusty winds, itll actually feel on the cool side now. Now certainly cool along north sea coast, nine or 10 degrees at best, but head further inland its the low to mid teens or the warmest spots again, western scotland, the high teens, maybe even more than that. And like the last few days with the dry and sunny weather, tree pollen will be high or very high for many of us. So as we head through thursday evening and overnight that area, clouds, splashes of rain In The South East starts to migrate westwards across much of england and also wales. Whereas the northern half of the country will see clearer skies, slightly lighter winds. So another chilly one here. Less cold, though, where we have the cloud, the rain and also the stronger breeze. So for friday, some changes for england and wales. Weve got a number of weather fronts bringing more Cloud Outbreaks of rain, whereas scotland, Northern Ireland poking out into the high pressure. Well have yet another dry and sunny day. Pretty decent temperatures for western scotland, but england and wales will see outbreaks of rain. Longer spells of rain, northern england, showery in nature, i think parts of wales, central and southern england, a little bit of sunshine in between. But with more cloud and showers around, thatll impact the temperatures ten to 13 degrees here, whereas again, another fairly warm one for parts of scotland. But it is all change as we head into the weekend. Lower pressure starts to bring more unsettled weather for a time. And as that low clears into the north sea, it opens the floodgates to a cold arctic northerly. So a much colder spell expected, particularly towards the end of the weekend and into next week. But you can see those temperatures beginning to fall across the north of the uk. Live from washington, this is bbc news. Welcome to viewers on pbs in america. Residents flee the sudanese capital as the death toll from violence between amy and Paramilitary Forces climbs. The Us Supreme Court delays a decision on access to a widely used abortion medication. And germanys president draws parallels between the nazi crackdown of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and president putins invasion of ukraine. Hello. Im sumi somaskanda. Were going to start with some developing news out of yemen. Officials say up to 80 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in a stampede at a school
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