The Babylon Bee sat down with Elon Musk for a wide-ranging interview discussing free speech, his purchase of Twitter to free The Bee, and - most importantly - what video games he's playing right now.

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#elonmusk #tesla #twitter #babylonbee #comedy #woke #spacex

Of course you could just do a double split in my life.

I mean I like it if they don't break into song too often,

Yeah, it wasn't until it wasn't until March of 2022 that we, uh...

Well, speaking of, we have the sound bite

It's the Babylon Bee at Twitter headquarters.

We wanted to give you something, actually.

Well, you know, pretty soon $44 billion won't be worth that much anyway.

But it's seriously crazy to us we come into the Twitter Twitter headquarters We were you know banned from Twitter in March 2022 You restored us and a bunch of other accounts in November, 2022.

And then now we're invited and we get to come here and we weren't even allowed to go into our account.

Absolutely, it's like barbarians storming the barbarians, not merely at the gate, but through the gate and pillaging the merch.

When you came in, so you took over, you closed the deal, there was the lawsuit, there was all that,

We were like riding a roller coaster wondering what was actually going to happen because we had

no idea if he would ever actually take over the company if we would ever actually get out of Twitter jail because we had vowed to never delete that tweet.

So we were watching and just kind of wondering what's really happening.

Then you finally take over and you go in on day 1, what are the conversations?

Like what happened behind the scenes where you're talking with the team, you're trying to figure out what to do with the advertisers and all of that.

What was the conversation behind the scene around restoring accounts?

There were a few questions around why I was carrying a sink.

I've still run into people who don't actually, they ask me, why did you walk into the lobby with a sink?

I felt like if I showed up with a sink, they'd have to let me in.

Because you can't help but let that sink in.

It also seems like the perfect Halloween costume.

Presumably you want to get into people's houses.

So You came in though and you said bring back the Babylon B, bring back these accounts and then there was pushback, right?

That's what was reported anyway, just going off of what was in the news.

I was trying to figure out how to run this place, what was going on.

And it's very difficult when the whole company works from home.

It's like, normally you could walk around, introduce yourself to people and have conversations but Twitter had gone to almost fully work from home.

So this building was empty And Twitter buildings around the world were empty.

So it was just very difficult actually just trying to understand what was going on.

I'd say like the analogy would be like being teleported into a plane that's in a nosedive with its engines on fire and the controls don't work.

And you got to take it out of the nosedive.

You got to reconnect the controls, you know, like who's, what's the org structure, what's the management team?

Because unlike literally the hour 1 of the thing closing, I exited the top 4 people at the company.

So it was like organizational structure was like Swiss cheese that you put in the microwave.

You finding it to be better these days or what?

Well, I only use the following tab because to me that's what I always wanted social media to be was just Everybody I follow in order, exactly the order that it's posted.

So the For You is more the algorithm driven stuff.

Yeah, but I think you should try the For You.

And my time on the app is insane because it's feeding me so much stuff, you know, like the stuff that I'm watching like crazy fight scenes.

You get some weird like no context humans or CCTV video.

I'm getting drawn into these things, you know, CCTV stuff.

I mean, I'm seeing a mix of opinions too.

I'm seeing people that I disagree with pop up that I don't follow.

They only want to see people that they agree with.

Well, the system actually does take into account your interactions.

So basically if you argue with someone else, it'll assume that you like arguing.

Which probably, maybe someone secretly does actually like arguing.

They may not want to admit it, but they actually like it.

It's like that Monty Python sketch, have you ever seen that 1 where...

You're here for an argument, he accidentally goes into the insults room first.

So if 1 account argues with another account, the algorithm will assume that that's what you want.

Or more of that, you know, because you chose your time, to spend your time that way, so it will actually then show you content that other content you might want to interact with.

But I think that over time the recommended for you tweets should be extremely compelling.

The most compelling tweets from your followers are also in For You.

So skip the boring ones that people post and go right to the good stuff.

I mean there are some accounts that I follow that tweet 20 times a day or more.

But if you'd want to say the best of the people that you follow should be in for you or something's wrong.

But the intent is to maximize unregretted user time.

So that's, I think, the metric I've got the whole organization focused on is unregretted user time.

I mean, so because I mean, I frequently hear someone tell me they spent a lot of time on TikTok, but They

And so that's, I'll call it, you know, regretted user time.

And you know, so if we can, we want it to be that you spent the time on X slash Twitter and you're glad you did.

And I do, I think, get more laughs from Twitter per day than everything else combined, frankly.

Yeah, because everybody's moving towards algorithm.

Facebook's algorithm, and YouTube's all algorithm driven, and TikTok.

So what's Twitter doing differently that's getting you that unregretted user time compared with these other apps?

Well, I guess it matters what content is on a system to be recommended in the first place.

So TikTok has a lot of teen dance videos, so that's a popular topic.

Twitter is more of intellectual debates and learning things.

And humor, it's much more a variety show, but includes serious information and the brain breaking news.

So it matters that even if you had identical algorithms between Facebook and Twitter, if Twitter's content is better or more interesting in that way, you still prefer Twitter.

And as you've seen, we've open sourced the algorithm and made, at this point, I think, well over 100 changes based on user feedback.

But how will we stay informed if NPR isn't there anymore?

You know, at any given point, I'm not sure if NPR is there or not.

I wasn't aware that they were there until they said they were not going to be there.

When I found out Jim Carrey was leaving Twitter I'm like, I didn't know Jim Carrey was on Twitter.

We're trying to apply the rules consistently at Twitter so that the NPR thing is like, well, If we're going to call some media state affiliated, well, there's plenty of media organizations in the US or in the West that are state affiliated.

So then we should apply the label equally.

And said that state affiliated implies that the state has editorial authority of an influence over the content.

And I'm like, so you're saying you don't have that?

Well yeah, I mean they, NPR literally on their own website said government funding is essential to their operation.

And so we even changed it from state affiliated to state funded.

So that's just literally a statement of fact.

I mean we could actually just lift the same text from their website and put it at the label.

It gives the wrong impression, the true impression.

Well, I mean, I think they're going to pull their punches in critiquing the government at NPR.

That's just a guess, you know, based on their extreme dependence on government funding.

Let's real quick, though, back to when you came into Twitter.

Okay, so the plane is going down and you're at the controls and trying to save it.

But you also did want to restore banned accounts.

And so the trust and safety team and everybody, were they arguing with you about that, pushing back on that?

Or was it primarily advertisers who were giving you the most pressure and saying, if you restore all these accounts, we're pulling our ads?

What was happening there with the pressure you were getting?

Well, I mean, it was just a totally chaotic situation.

Because I still got to run Tesla and SpaceX while trying to figure out anything about how Twitter runs.

Where I exited the top 4 people in the first hour and then there were a ton of others that either got exited or quit.

So it was really just trying to keep the wheels on the bus is the top priority.

Twitter code base is actually much more complex than you think and it's not something that just works, you know.

And there were many people who predicted that the service would go down and Twitter's not going to exist after this weekend.

Yeah, it was going to get crushed by the World Cup.

The number of predictions that Twitter is about to die were ridiculous.

I mean, 1 can just go, like almost farcical, frankly.

But they did kind of have a point in that it wasn't super easy to keep things running.

There are so many esoteric corners of the Twitter software and the system operations that make it hard to keep running.

It's not like some app on the phone that just works.

Financially it was a very tough situation because Twitter in a normal year would do probably $4.5 billion in revenue,

They'd probably lose a little bit of money because I, you know, that's why I call it a really expensive non-profit because Twitter is, over its lifetime I believe, a negative on profitability.

Like it's lost more money than it's made.

But because of the high price of the acquisition, which is very foolishly high on my part, There's $12.5 billion of debt and debts I was saying is $1.5 billion.

And then there's a cyclic decline in advertising that seems to start maybe around May of this year But was pretty significant.

That's what you saw Facebook and Google and others also do some layoffs as a result So there's a cyclic decline in advertising and then a pretty major pause in advertising where advertisers weren't they just put their campaigns on pause.

I mean, in a few cases they did, but most

in response to you taking over and promising free speech?

They're like, oh, we don't want free speech.

Yes, well, It's more like they are worried about something that would affect their brand I suppose.

Although it seems like sometimes they worry about the wrong things.

They should be worried about some things and they aren't and aren't worried about other things and should be.

But nonetheless, a lot of the advertisers put their advertising on pause to kind of like see where things go.

And that causes about a, I'd say almost a 50% reduction in revenue immediately.

So in rough terms we're doing about negative $3 billion a year in cash flow And possibly trending to do worse than that, possibly 4 or 5.

And a billion dollars in the bank, so roughly 4 months to live.

Like you would have to continue to fund it, you'd have to seek funding from outside.

Yeah, I mean it's limited to how much Tesla stock I can sell and I can't sell it all the time.

I mean the reason I sold stock in December last year, which I regret at this point, was because I wasn't sure how much money Twitter would need.

billion cash burn, and we don't know where revenue is going to bottom out.

I had to get the company to financial stability, which we were close to financial stability, roughly, not quite break-even, but close to it.

I think it's at least the plane's in level flight.

The engine of engineering, software engineering, is in much better shape.

I think we've deployed more features and capabilities in the last 6 months than Twitter has done in the last 6 years.

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The Babylon Bee Talks With Elon Musk at Twitter Headquarters