In a rare lengthy BBC interview, Fr. Twitter Elon Musk he talked about his vision, his business moves as well as his personal life.

He defended himself the way Twitter is run has responded to the rise of misinformation on the platform since taking over, he acknowledged that his workload forced him to sleep on the couch in the library at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco while his dog Floki takes over the reins of the business, and called the lessons which he learned while being forced into thousands of layoffs.

The BBC summarizes the six points of the interview with the second richest man in the world that many have questions.

“Hate speech has not increased”

He denies the “excuses” of many that hate content has increased since acquiring the popular platform last October.

He says that disinformation and hate speech have declined since the takeover.

As insiders told the BBC a few weeks ago, the company can no longer protect users from trolls, government misinformation and child sexual exploitation following massive layoffs and sweeping changes by Musk.

According to Twitter, in March alone, 400,000 accounts were suspended for security reasons.

“I voted for Biden”

About half of the voters in the latest 2020 presidential election voted for Donald Trump, he said, adding: “I was not one of them. I voted for Biden.”

Elsewhere in the interview, he defended his decision to unblock Trump on Twitter, whose account was blocked in 2021 for inciting violence.

“Twitter is winning the battle of disinformation”

In a war of disinformation, Musk has said his efforts to remove bots — automated accounts — have reduced fake news since last October.

“My experience tells me that there is less misinformation than there is more,” he says. But the people of Jerusalem disagree.

A study by Newsguard, a tool that assesses the validity of information and identifies disinformation online, shows that engagement with popular disinformation accounts has skyrocketed since Musk took office.

Within a week of its appearance on Twitter, the most popular, untrusted accounts saw a nearly 60 percent increase in user activity, measured in likes and retweets, according to the survey.

In addition, an independent BBC analysis of at least 1,000 previously suspended accounts reinstated by Musk found that more than a third of them contained misinformation or offensive content, including anti-vaccination claims, misogyny and anti-LGBT content, as well as denial of the results, once restored. presidential elections.

He will reject the takeover bid.

In an interview, he initially stated that if someone offered to buy Twitter right now for what he paid, he would refuse. If, however, he decided to sell it, he emphasized how a candidate who loves the “truth” will be preferred not the buyer who will offer more, because, as he explains, “I don’t care about money.”

Something, however, which the BBC notes is not right, recalling its attempt to back out of a takeover deal.

Twitter’s expenses exceeded its income. According to the latest financial results prior to Musk’s arrival, total sales reached $5 billion in 2021 and costs and expenses hit $5.5 billion. In fact, it has only had two profitable years since 2012.

He believes Twitter is approaching the point where its revenue-to-expenditure ratio will reverse and become profitable. “No wonder cutting 6,500 jobs is helping cut costs,” the BBC commented sharply.

Twitter is approaching that milestone, but the question remains whether it can maintain its lucrative course and is worth the $44 billion investment.

It all comes down to how the BBC is characterized.

Musk also confirmed that after last week’s backlash, he would change the description of the BBC on Twitter from “public funded” to “public funded”.

The British Public Broadcaster objected to the description of the media, emphasizing the independence of the organization, which is financed mainly by the British people through television payments to households with televisions.

TV user fees accounted for 71% of the BBC’s total £5.3bn revenue in 2022, with the rest coming from its commercial and other activities, including grants and television rights.

In an interview on Wednesday, Musk noted that “if we use the same words that the BBC uses to describe itself, that would obviously be a good thing,” promising to change the description.

Source: BBC