the bbc has been speaking to twitter s owner, elon musk. the last minute, unexpected interview came about after the bbc objected to a new tag describing it as government funded media on its main twitter account. in the interview the billionaire agreed to change this to publicy funded. he also defended the site s policing of hate speech and the mass sackings of staff and described taking over the social media firm as painful. do you have any regrets about buying twitter? i think it was something that needed to be done. it s been quite difficult. i would say, the pain level of twitter has been extremely high. this hasn t been some sort of party, so, it s been really quite a stressful situation in the last several months, not an easy one. so it s been quite painful, but i think at the end of the day, it should have been done and were there are many mistakes made along the way, of course? live now to san francisco and our technology correspondent james clayton. this was a sur
front of me i did not quite believe he was actually going to do it. any side you can ask me anything. it was meant to be an interview that lasted happen and ended up being almost an hour and a half and we went to all sorts of issues with twitter, how many staff had been sacked. towards the end of the interview he was talking about what it s like to go to parties when you are as famous as elon musk and how it is difficult to trust anyone. it was a really wide ranging interview with lots of lines. he said he is going to take that label of the bbc account that said government funded, it is now going to say publicly funded and he is going to do that tomorrow. he also said he was forced to buy twitter because he thought he was going to lose a court case in november, that is ultimately why he bought twitter and he said he was going to potentially sell twitter if the right person came along. so it was a very long interview with all sorts of news lines generated. spoke