who were previously banned for spreading things like qanon conspiracies. you had people like andrew tate who were brought back, who were previously banned for things hate speech. do you think you prioritise freedom of speech over misinformation and hate speech? well, who is to say that something is misinformation? who is the arbiter of that? is it the bbc? are you literally asking me? you are the arbiter on twitter, because you own twitter. i m saying, who is to say? one person s misinformation is another person s information. the point at which you say, this is misinformation. but you accept misinformation can be dangerous, that it can cause real world harms, that it can potentially cause. the point i m trying to make is that the bbc itself has at times published things that are false. do you agree that has occurred? i am quite sure the bbc had said things that have turned out not
and we re doing it with a small fraction of the original headcount. you mentioned outages there. 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 algorithm by 80%, so the actual cpu
so there is a cyclic drop which is still pretty significant, but in rough numbers, revenue dropped from 4.5 billion to three, and expenses went from 4.5 to six, creating a $3 billion negative cash flow situation, and twitter having $1 billion in the bank, that is four months to live. so, unless drastic action was taken immediately this company was going to die. let s talk about that drastic action, because almost immediately you sacked a lot of twitter workers. and i spoke to them, it was very easy to speak to them when it happened, and the way, they said, pretty much everyone said, is it felt quite haphazard and it felt a little bit uncaring. i wouldn t say uncaring. the issue was, like,
some say little, some say a bit more. i think your own lawyer said you couldn t get a fair trial in san francisco because there are lots of people don t necessarily like you here. i have to say, i was wrong, or he was wrong, i guess, because i was acquitted by a san franciscojury unanimously, so. do you have any regrets buying twitter? i think it was something that needed to be done. it has been quite difficult, you know, i would say the pain level of twitter has been extremely high, it hasn t been some sort of party, so it has been really quite a stressful situation for the last several months, not an easy one. apart from the pain, it has been quite painful, but at the end of the day,
also here in the us. what does that look like? this is bbc news. we ll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. it s not every day you get invited by one of the world s richest and most influential people to a sit down interview. earlier on tuesday, i d received a response to an e mailfrom mr musk. let s do an interview tonight, it read. just a few short hours later, we were setting up in twitter s headquarters in san francisco. hello, how are you doing? really nice to meet you, too. we are about to go live, very surprisingly, we only just found this out, on twitter, that that is elon musk. we didn t know about that,