Elon Musk bought Twitter in October last year for $44 billion.
With the series of events happening with the poor Blue Bird since last year, it is safe to say that in no time we could see a movie based on Twitter. Adding to the never-ending saga of events, now the microblogging platform’s boss and billionaire Elon Musk admitted in an interview with BBC that he bought Twitter because he thought he would be forced to do so legally.
In an interview with BBC reporter James Clayton, Musk admitted that he went with the Twitter acquisition deal only because he “kind of had to” and believed that he would be forced by the court anyway. Musk, who also heads Tesla and SpaceX, said that running the microblogging company has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster.”
“The pain level has been extremely high, this hasn’t been some kind of party,” Musk told BBC’s Clayton; adding that the company is “roughly breaking even” and as most of its advertisers have returned to the platform.
Just to recall, after proposing a buyout of Twitter in April last year, Musk has filed several requests to terminate the $44 billion acquisition agreement. Following this, Twitter filed a lawsuit against the billionaire for walking away from the proposed deal. Tesla’s chief executive countersued, accusing the platform of misrepresenting the number of false and spam accounts on its service.
However, after months of speculations, several agreements, a few court cases, and gazillion tweets, Musk finally bought Twitter in October last year for $44 billion, the price he originally agreed upon for the platform. Following Musk’s takeover, the Blue Bird has managed to garner regular headlines about its weakening content moderation policies, a surge in fake accounts, re-activation of accounts of some controversial celebrities, and its cost-cutting measures including mass layoffs.
In the interview, Musk said that reducing the Twitter workforce from just under 8,000 at the time of his purchase to about 1,500 had not been easy. “I wouldn’t say it was uncaring… If the whole ship sinks, then nobody’s got a job,” he told the media organization.
The timing of Musk’s interview with BBC is interesting as Twitter recently attached a “Government Funded Media” label to the main BBC account, igniting a debate within the United Kingdom over the label’s accuracy, also prompting a strong response from the public broadcaster. In a statement on Monday, the BBC criticized the new label and said it was seeking clarification from Twitter to “resolve the issue.”
In the interview, Musk said he “actually do have a lot of respect for the BBC” and added that Twitter is adjusting the label to BBC being “publicly funded.”
