Elon Musk: The most shocking statements from Twitter head’s surprise interview

Elon Musk has conducted one of the most surprising interviews of a very surprising life, which included statements about his dog’s role as Twitter’s chief executive and a series of bawdy jokes.

Mr Musk gave the interview to the BBC’s James Clayton, who had asked whether he would talk about his first six months at the company.

The Twitter boss talked about all that and more, addressing a range of topics in the hours long interview.

Here are some of the most shocking moments from the interview.

Mr Musk had asked his followers whether he should step down as Twitter chief executive late last year, and promised to comply with the result of the poll. It said that he should, and he committed to resign – eventually.

He was asked about that promise, and whether he had made any progress on finding a replacement. He said that he had – his dog.

“I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter,” he said. “I said I would appoint a new CEO and I did and it’s my dog.”

It appeared to be a callback to a tweet, posted in February, in which Mr Musk shared an image of the dog wearing a “CEO” shirt and said that he was “amazing”.

Mr Musk appeared to be joking. But he also has a habit of making statements that appear to be jokes which then become true – including, arguably, his first commitment to buy Twitter in the first place.

Elon Musk has been fairly transparent about his intense working conditions at Twitter, which he has expected other members of staff to commit to as well. That has included sleeping in the office – and he told the BBC that he does so in a secret spot in the office library where nobody else goes.

There appears to be plenty of unused space, since Mr Musk has sacked many of the staff that previously worked for the company and in its offices. Mr Musk told the BBC that he had suggested he could use the space as a homeless shelter, but that his landlord had objected.

Mr Musk seemed to take particular pleasure in the fact that “BBC” is a lewd term from pornography, as well as the name of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He giggled at length as he asked the journalist whether he “like[s] BBC”, and retweeted a clip of himself doing so after the interview was aired.

In the months since Mr Musk took over Twitter, it has been hit by a range of technical problems, some of which have left it entirely offline for significant amounts of time. But some had speculated that the site could stop working entirely, especially given so many staff were no longer working on it.

Mr Musk acknowledged those problems, as he has done in the past. But he said that it has mostly been working.

He said much the same about the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, when questioned by Mr Clayton. When asked about whether the dismissal of staff who had been employed for content moderation had harmed the site’s functioning, he hit back in what made for an awkward couple of minutes of the interview.

Twitter’s chief problems have not been technical, but rather financial. And Mr Musk suggested the situation had been dire: he had to take the “drastic” action of firing staff to avoid financial difficulties that left the company with “four months left to live”, he said.

Having paid $44 billion for a company that is worth much less than that, and which he admitted had caused him pain, Mr Clayton asked whether he would be happy to sell the company on for the price he paid.

He rejected the idea. But he suggested that he might sell Twitter on if he were to receive an offer from somebody with a similar commitment to the truth.