hello and welcome. let s return to the last minute unexpected interview that elon musk the boss of twitter and ceo of tesla has been doing with the bbc s james clayton. this came about after the bbc objected to a new tag describing it as government funded media on its main twitter account. james began by asking him why he decided to do this interview. there is a lot going on, so i thought this might be a good opportunity to answer some questions and. you know, i guess maybe get some feedback, too. what should we be doing different? i know the bbc for example is not thrilled about being labelled state funded media. it has viciously objected to that term, do you want to respond to it? i wanted to be as truthful and accurate as possible. i think we are adjusting the label to be publicly funded, which i think is perhaps not too objectionable. we are trying to be accurate. too objectionable. we are trying to be accurate- too objectionable. we are trying to be accurate. publ
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. 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,
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.
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 they d run it at roughly break even. but that is not bankruptcy. you re 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. it s been a little higher on twitter, but a lot of the advertisers are coming back,
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 isn t 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.