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. i sold a lot of tesla stock to close this deal. i did not want to sell
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 it s currently working fine. it doesn t keep you up at night that twitter might go offline again? at this point we ve 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. we ve made so many improvements to the core algorithm and in some cases we ve improved the core
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, 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 more partisan politics politics, and moreover partisan politics that are on the very far left of the spectrum.
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, because when i first made the offer the response was the board had
to people very recently that have been involved 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 don t. 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 don t 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 in tiktok but they regret the time spent and that seems like, 0k, well, we don t 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.