Elon Musk has described the experience of owning Twitter as “quite painful” in a new interview.
“It’s been quite a rollercoaster,” the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder told the BBC, speaking of his time as CEO of the social media company, which he bought in October.
The company has faced a string of controversies since his takeover, including Mr Musk firing thousands of employees.
In a new interview, broadcast on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday morning and listened to by more than three million people, he has opened up about his time as CEO of the firm, saying: “It’s not been boring. It’s been quite a rollercoaster.”
He said the “pain level has been extremely high”, adding: “This hasn’t been some kind of party”.
But he said while it has been “really quite a stressful situation over the last several months”, he did not regret purchasing Twitter and things are going “reasonably well” for the firm.
Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, Mr Musk admitted having “shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times”, regarding controversial tweets he has posted in the past.
He also said Twitter is now “roughly breaking even” financially, as “most” of the site’s advertisers have returned.
Following his 44 billion dollar (£38 billion) takeover of the platform in October, many advertisers paused work with the site over concerns about Mr Musk’s approach to content moderation.
“You can see [the increased advertising] for yourself on Twitter,” Mr Musk said.
“I think almost all of them [who left] have either come back or said they were going to come back. There’s very few exceptions.
“Depending on how things go, if current trends continue, we could be... cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well.”
He also revealed legacy blue checkmarks will finally be removed by next week.
Mr Musk said last month that legacy-verified Twitter users would see their blue ticks removed from the service on April 1, unless they paid a monthly fee of 8 US dollars (£6.40) to its Twitter Blue subscription operation.
As a result, thousands of the platform’s high-profile users were braced to lose the ticks, which can help verify their identity and distinguish them from imposters.
But the legacy blue ticks have remained in place past April 1.
