Musk on hate speech, Twitter lay-offs and sleeping in the office

As we've said - and as you may have noticed yourself, if you watched the interview - this was a long and rather meandering interview, in which Elon Musk touched upon a variety of topics beyond Twitter. Here's a few things he mentioned:

• Musk bought Twitter "because a court was going to force him to," he said right off the bat. The startlingly frank answer set the tone for the interview
• Trump "may or may not come back" to Twitter but the platform should not be about partisan politics and if it wants to be a "digital town square" it should allow people of all political persuasions

• Musk voted for Joe Biden, rather than Donald Trump, in 2021. There has been much speculation over Musk's political allegiances
• He wanted to turn one of the Twitter office buildings into a homeless shelter but building management "rejected" the proposal

• Asked whether he's an impulsive person, Musk acknowledged he "shot himself in the foot with tweets multiple times" and said he would "wear bulletproof shoes" going forward. That's when he then said that he should "probably" not tweet after 3am

EPACopyright: EPA

US public broadcaster NPR has decided to leave Twitter, following a row with the social media firm over a new label associating it with government control.

The new tag - which describes NPR as "government funded media" - was initially "state-affiliated media", the same designation used for media organisations linked to autocratic regimes in Russia, China and Iran.

NPR says even the "government funded" label is misleading and inaccurate, pointing out that less than 1% of its $300m annual budget comes from the US government.

The broadcaster's CEO John Lansing says the decision was taken to avoid having its journalism hosted on a platform that will "risk our credibility", adding he has "lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter".

The move means all 52 of NPR's accounts will no longer post on Twitter, but Lansing adds individual NPR journalists and employees will be allowed to make their own decisions over whether to continue using the social media app.

The BBC is currently in a dispute with Twitter over a similar move, although Elon Musk did tell James Clayton in last night's interview the company plans to amend the label on the BBC's main account to say "publicly funded" media.

But NPR says that, even if the description is changed to "publicly funded" on its Twitter accounts as well, it will not change the decision to stop using the platform.

When it comes to Elon Musk’s claim that misinformation has fallen on Twitter, the devil is in the detail - or lack thereof.

He claimed in the interview that there was now less misinformation on the platform because since he took over they had “eliminated so many of the bots that were pushing scams and spam”.

But exclusive BBC research tells a different story. We analysed more than 1,000 previously banned accounts that had been let back on Twitter since Musk bought the company and found that since being reinstated, over a third of them had spread hate or misinformation.

This included false anti-vax claims, misogyny and anti-LGBT rhetoric, and the denial of the true result of the US 2020 election.

It is possible that Musk’s take on misinformation is more limited than the criteria we used, but in order to see definitively what’s happened you’d need two things: access to data before and after his takeover and - crucially - a clear understanding of how misinformation is being defined in Twitter’s Musk era. We don’t have a full picture of either.

More than three million Twitter users listened to the Musk interview live, but he opened up a brief question-and-answer session afterwards to just a few people.

Among them were influencers on the right-wing culture war fringes.

At the behest of one of them, he defended a far-right troll who was recently convicted of tricking people into wasting their vote in the 2016 US presidential election.

On his own Twitter account, Musk has engaged with QAnon influencers and other marginal characters.

He's also railed against pronouns and Covid restrictions - both red meat topics for hardcore American conservatives.

Perhaps it's a way for one of the world's richest people to maintain a veneer of edginess, but there are signs that some of his more out-there tweets are turning off some users and advertisers.

Elon Musk defended the way in which Twitter employees were dismissed as the firm shed thousands of staff from around 8,000 to currently 1,500.

He said the company had faced bankruptcy if it did not "cut costs immediately", while also acknowledging it was a "painful" process for him.

But for lawyer Jo Keddie, who represented a substantial number of UK Twitter employees facing redundancy through law firm Winckworth Sherwood, there were concerns about a "lack of proper process" for those affected by redundancy and how they were being treated by the firm.

Whatever the financial situation, Keddie tells me, there are strict legal obligations that cannot be ignored, including consulting with affected employees:

Quote Message: We felt it necessary to remind Twitter UK of those obligations on a number of occasions when we were supporting several affected employees who had been 'locked out of the office and the IT systems without any prior warning in early November 2022."

We felt it necessary to remind Twitter UK of those obligations on a number of occasions when we were supporting several affected employees who had been 'locked out of the office and the IT systems without any prior warning in early November 2022."

Elon Musk appears to be have become even more eccentric in recent years, at a significant cost to his reputation, a former BBC technology editor has said.

Rory Cellan-Jones, who interviewed the billionaire in 2016 about his then-insurgent electric car company Tesla, thinks part of the issue is Musk himself is a "Twitterholic" - that is to say, the company's boss is addicted to using his new platform to the detriment of other business ventures.

He says seven years ago Musk was a "colourful" and talkative interview subject, but his conversation with the BBC last night encapsulates a growing problem for the tech executive.

Cellan-Jones says "childish" antics have done a lot to destroy a reputation built up through "bold, brave and imaginative" work at Tesla and his rocket firm Space X.

As evidence for this, he cites Twitter's claim that traditional verification will be removed from accounts which don't pay for the new Twitter Blue subscription service on 20 April - a day referred to as 4/20 and mostly associated with cannabis use and internet meme culture.

"Musk is like a brilliant artist, who spends all of his time on Instagram talking rubbish", Cellan-Jones adds.

In an encounter with Elon Musk you may be talking to the world’s richest man, an entrepreneur in his early 50s and a father of young (and older) children.

But you are also talking to a gamer and a prolific social media user who is absolutely soaked in the jargon and banter of internet culture and who, by his own admission, "probably shouldn’t tweet after 3am".

From the very start of his interview and continuing later on Twitter, he couldn’t resist repeatedly sniggering at the BBC acronym because it also has an unofficial explicit meaning.

Believe me, those of us who work here have heard it all before.

His fans lapped this up, of course, because he was effectively blowing a raspberry in our faces. He was playing to his own crowd, and thoroughly enjoying it.

However, in a more serious moment he said that actually he respects the BBC and what it does.

In the course of the interview he flipped constantly between Elon the class clown and Elon the business leader.

One minute he’s talking about the enormous financial challenges facing Twitter and what he has done to prevent it from going bust, the next he’s joking that his dog is now the CEO.

Perhaps the dirty jokes were a defence mechanism, perhaps it was pure theatre – or maybe a mixture of the two.

But whatever was going on inside his head, he was careful not to display a single chink in the armour.

This isn’t the first time that the BBC has tried to interview Elon Musk since he took over Twitter. For a recent investigation for BBC Panorama I tried to get in touch with Musk - with no response.

It was only after the investigation aired that the man himself tweeted about it.

"Sorry for turning Twitter from nurturing paradise into a place that has… trolls," he said in one tweet, posting a screengrab of the report.

"Trolls are kinda fun," Mr Musk said in another reply.

His tweets unleashed a torrent of abuse against me from other users. There were hundreds of posts, many including misogynistic slurs and abusive language. There have also been threatening messages, including depictions of kidnap and hanging - more proof to back up BBC Panorama's investigation that hate on Twitter is thriving.

The whole episode raised questions about what freedom of expression really means on the new Twitter, where trolling seems to be fair game and even journalists looking to hold the social media platform to account become the targets.

During the interview with the BBC, Elon Musk dismissed - and joked about - concerns about hate speech and disinformation.

His approach contrasted starkly with what Twitter insiders told me in interviews for a recent BBC Panorama investigation.

They said that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under his ownership.

Both current and former employees explained how features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times.

Exclusive academic data plus testimony from Twitter users backs up their allegations, suggesting hate is thriving under Mr Musk's leadership, with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.

The investigation for Panorama also revealed how targeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression, and foreign influence operations - once removed daily from Twitter - are going "undetected", according to a recent employee.

Rape survivors have been targeted by accounts that have become more active since the takeover, with indications they've been reinstated or newly created.

Twitter and Musk did not reply to the BBC’s request for comment.

Elon Musk claims that even if someone offered to buy Twitter now for the $44bn he paid for it, he’d say “no”. But is that true? Remember, Musk desperately tried to back out of the deal.

He claims Twitter had just months left to live when he took over and was being run like a non-profit.

Twitter’s costs were outstripping the amount of revenue it was generating. In its last full-year results published before Musk took over, total sales hit $5bn in 2021 but costs and expenses reached $5.5bn. In fact, it has only had two profitable years since 2012.

Musk reckons Twitter is now close to breaking even. No wonder - sacking 6,500 workers does tend to lighten one’s costs.

But he has also been proactive in finding ways to boost sales through things such as changing Twitter users for “blue tick” verification.

So yes, Twitter might be nearing break even now because of drastic cost-cutting. But the question is whether it can sustain that path to profitability and make the company worth that $44bn price tag.

If you literally only have a couple of minutes but want to catch up on Musk's interview with the BBC, here's a highlights video - in 90 seconds:

The trials and tribulations of Twitter as a business are rarely far from the headlines, so how the social media firm's finances are doing was a key part of Elon Musk's interview.

Here are some of his key claims about the health of the social media firm:

• Asked if he bought Twitter for $44bn because a US court forced him too, Musk says "yeah, yeah I did"
• The firm's CEO says Twitter is "roughly breaking even" after previous management ran it functionally as a "non-profit"

• He says the company was on track to collapse within four months of him taking over, after a drop in revenue from around $4.5bn (£3.6bn) a year to $3bn
• Musk adds that "drastic action" was required, which led to his sacking of around 6,500 staff members since he took over
• He acknowledges recent events led to some turbulence in revenue over advertisers leaving the platform, but he says they "are coming back"

Afrer Musk's purchase of Twitter for $44bn last year he took the company private, which means the BBC is unable to check his claims about its finances.

In his interview, Elon Musk said he "sometimes" slept in Twitter's HQ on a couch in a "library that nobody goes to" on the seventh floor.

When Musk first took over Twitter, several employees shared photos of its office space that had been converted into bedrooms.

At the time, Musk also emailed all Twitter staff saying they would "need to be extremely hardcore" to succeed, and work "long hours at high intensity".

"Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade," he wrote.

In a tweet he subsequently deleted, Musk posted that he himself would work and sleep in the office "until the org is fixed".

You can watch the full interview at the top of this page by clicking the clip.

If you're in the UK you can also watch on BBC iPlayer.

Want to catch up on the key things Musk said? Read our full story here.

EPACopyright: EPA

Elon Musk says a new label on the @BBC Twitter account describing the corporation as "government funded media" is to be updated.

The appearance of the designation saw the BBC contact Twitter - with a spokesperson saying it wanted to resolve the issue "as soon as possible".

As the UK's national broadcaster, the BBC operates through a Royal Charter agreed with the government.

The BBC Charter states the corporation "must be independent", particularly over "editorial and creative decisions, the times and manner in which its output and services are supplied, and in the management of its affairs".

A licence fee is paid by UK households and raised £3.8bn ($4.7bn) in 2022 for the BBC, accounting for about 71% of the corporation's total income of £5.3bn - with the rest coming from its commercial and other activities like grants, royalties and rental income.

The BBC also receives more than £90m per year from the government to support the BBC World Service, which predominantly serves non-UK audiences.

The national broadcaster's output is also paid for through the work of commercial subsidiaries like BBC Studios, as well as through advertising on services offered to audiences outside of the UK.

It's nearly 01:00 in San Francisco, where the interview was held - and Elon Musk has been tweeting.

He's retweeted a few memes that poke fun at the BBC interview, and also posted: "I said BBC could come Twitter, then, to my surprise, a reporter shows up"

Earlier in the day, he emailed our reporter about the interview he had requested, saying: "let's do it tonight".

These kinds of interviews - ones that are high-profile and will cover a wide range of topics - are usually organised well in advance.

But Elon Musk is notoriously unpredictable.

James Clayton's interview with him on Tuesday evening, came about after he emailed the Twitter boss asking about the BBC's labelling on Twitter as "government-funded media".

Usually, a reporter would receive a reply from someone within the company's media team - but not Elon Musk. He replied personally, so Clayton took his shot and asked for an interview.

"Let's do it tonight" was the reply.

In the end, Clayton and the BBC team just had a few hours to prepare for an interview that was to be live streamed to three million people online on Twitter (a prerequisite from Musk) - as well as the BBC's audience.