Elon Musk says he has lower about 80% of Twitter’s staff

(CNN) – Elon Musk has fired greater than 6,000 folks on Twitter since taking on the corporate, he advised the BBC in a uncommon interview on Tuesday evening.

Within the interview, Musk was quoted as saying that the social media platform now has simply 1,500 staff, up from lower than 8,000 on the time of its acquisition. The discount equates to roughly 80% of the corporate’s workforce.

“It’s not enjoyable in any respect” and may generally be “painful,” the billionaire CEO of the British community stated at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

The second richest man on this planet stated that “draconian motion” was wanted when he joined Twitter, as a result of the corporate was dealing with a “detrimental $3 billion money movement scenario”. He estimated that Twitter solely had “4 months to dwell”. “This isn’t a case of care [o] Indifference. “If the entire ship goes down, no person has a job,” Musk stated.

Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion final October. After initially providing to take over the corporate in April 2022, he has tried to again out of the deal, citing issues concerning the variety of bot accounts he owns. Since then, he’s radically overhauled Twitter, firing its high executives, chopping jobs, and enacting new insurance policies about how customers’ accounts are verified or flagged. Since then, he advised the BBC, Twitter is now “kind of” at break-even and advertisers are returning to the platform.

Musk additionally vowed to vary the label utilized to the British channel from “government-funded” to “publicly funded” after the BBC’s objection. Appointment added over the weekend.

The BBC protested the transfer, saying it “was and all the time can be impartial”. “The British public funds us via license charges,” he stated on the time.

Musk additionally spoke about US scrutiny of TikTok, saying that though he wasn’t a person of the Chinese language-owned app, he was typically “towards banning issues.” “I imply, it could assist Twitter, I feel, if TikTok bought banned, as a result of folks would spend extra time on Twitter and fewer time on TikTok,” he stated. “However whereas that will assist Twitter, basically I’d be towards blocking issues.”

Musk additionally joked throughout the interview that he’s “now not the CEO of Twitter” and that he has been changed by his pet canine, a Shiba Inu named Floki.