Elon Musk says he has cut about 80% of Twitter’s staff since acquiring the social network

() — Elon Musk has fired more than 6,000 people at Twitter since taking over the company, he told the BBC in a rare interview on Tuesday night.

In the interview Musk was quoted as saying that the social media platform now has just 1,500 employees, up from fewer than 8,000 at the time of its acquisition. The reduction is equivalent to approximately 80% of the company’s workforce.

“It’s not fun at all” and can sometimes be “painful,” the billionaire CEO told the British network at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

The world’s second-richest man said “drastic action” was needed when he joined Twitter, because the company was facing “a $3 billion negative cash flow situation.” That left Twitter with only “four months to live,” he estimated. “This is not a care situation [o] indifference. It’s like, if the whole ship sinks, then nobody has a job,” Musk said.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October. After initially offering to take over the company in April 2022, he attempted to back out of the deal, citing concerns about how many bot accounts he had. Since then, he has radically overhauled Twitter, firing top executives, cutting jobs and enacting new policies on how user accounts are verified or tagged. Since then, Twitter is now “more or less” at breakeven and advertisers are returning to the platform, he told the BBC.

Musk also vowed to revise the label applied to the British channel from “government funded” to “publicly funded” after the BBC objected. The designation was added over the weekend.

The BBC had protested the move, saying it “is, and always has been, independent”. “We are funded by the British public through the license fee,” she said at the time.

Musk also spoke about the US scrutiny of TikTok, saying that while he wasn’t a user of the Chinese-owned app, he was generally “against banning things.” “I mean, it would help Twitter, I guess, if TikTok was banned, because then people would spend more time on Twitter and less time on TikTok,” he mused. “But while that would help Twitter, I would generally be against banning things.”

Musk also joked during the interview that he was “no longer the CEO of Twitter” and had been replaced by his pet dog, a Shiba Inu named Floki.