of you having an opinion? for example, tesla has major connections in china. you would not have a certain opinion on something or feel uncomfortable about saying something because of your other business interests elsewhere? do i look uncomfortable? actually, i do, i was trying to look uncomfortable. tesla has got activities around the world and so does spacex, and once in awhile those things do come into conflict. but it is not like twitter, you know, operates in china. it doesn t, it was banned in china. certainly, i have received no communication whatsoever from the chinese government with regard to twitter. in terms of advertising, twitter is not a private company any more, so we don t really know how it s all going. have all the advertisers come back? not all, but most. you can see it for yourself on twitter, even in the for you feed.
because when i first made the offer the response was the board had offered a poison pill, so they were like, hell no, you can t buy twitter, we d rather die. we ll, like, chew on cyanide before being bought, that was their initial response. and then you said, actually i don t want to buy it. and then they said, no, you must buy us, gun to the head, you have to buy us. i m like, are you the same people who said you would rather die than be bought? doesn t that seem odd? so, i guess my question to you is, you said that the reason was because of bots, because twitter was filled with bots. looking back at it now, was there a little bit of you that thought, actually, maybe i ve overpaid and actually maybe i don t want to do this, i want to get out of this? be honest.
interesting. so you didn t, you didn t actually want to purchase it, even when you said you were going to? well, not at that price. i think the analogy is pretty close. there is a warehouse full of goods. they say less than 5% of what s in the warehouse is broken, but then you walk into the warehouse and you see actually it is 25%. so you may still want to buy what is in that warehouse, but probably at a lower price. not buying the stuff that is broken. so you didn t have an epiphany. you just thought, i m going to have to buy this, i might as well bite the bullet? yeah. it is not super complicated. i m not sure you have said that before. cue a whole bunch of court cases. you said this in the bbc interview, blah blah, etc. you then came into twitter with a sink. what were your first impressions?
two were connected? well, people couldn t parse the difference me selling because i lost faith in tesla, 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 that gives equal voice to the whole country, and ideally the whole world. it should not be a partisan politics, and moreover partisan politics that are on the very far left of the spectrum. san francisco politics is normally quite niche but twitter effectively acted as a megaphone for very niche regional politics and megaphoned
usage is dramatically less, so. but the results speak for themselves. the system, despite being at all time highs of usage is fast. it is more responsive than it was before the takeover, and we have also added longform tweets. we ve added. you can now post videos up to two hours, soon videos of any length. we are rolling out our subscriber programme so that people can, content creators can actually make a living on twitter by having some of their content behind a pay wall. and we ve open sourced the algorithm so there is transparency about what tweets get shown, what content gets shown versus not. i think, what are you really going to trust? do you trust some black box algorithm from some other site, or are you going to trust the thing you can see and understand?