Elon Musk assured in an interview with the BBC on Wednesday that the management of Twitter had been comparable to a “roller coaster” and admitted “many mistakes”, six months after buying the company for 44 billion US dollars.
“Are there many mistakes made along the way? Of course,” said Mr. Musk, who has owned Twitter since late October. “But all’s well that ends well. I feel like we are heading in the right direction. He notably reiterated that the company was seeing advertisers return and was “roughly at the break-even point”.
The billionaire entrepreneur was speaking in a surprise interview with the BBC overnight and which the channel, which says it received an invitation from Mr Musk “at very short notice”, published excerpts on its site on Wednesday morning .
Mr Musk also said he would change the label assigned to the BBC on the platform, after the British channel complained of being branded “government-funded media”.
“We want to be as honest and accurate as possible — we’re adjusting the (BBC) label to ‘publicly funded’,” the Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter boss assured.
“The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public via the license fee,” the channel insisted earlier this week.
Twitter had a few days ago renounced stamping the American public radio NPR as being an American “state-affiliated media”, after the station’s protests.
The episode came days after Twitter stripped the New York Times of the official certification of his account, Elon Musk accusing the major daily, reputed to be rather progressive, of “propaganda”.
Twitter’s famous blue mark, until now a symbol of recognition, will be reserved from April 20 for those who pay to use it.
The billionaire entrepreneur readily shows contempt for the media. In recent times, questions from the press to Twitter’s communication service have been automatically sent an emoticon in the shape of a turd.
Mr. Musk, who last month signed a call for a pause in next-generation AI research, also called on Wednesday for the creation of a regulator “to ensure that (this technology) does not present no danger to the public.