Elon Musk recently confessed in a live interview with the BBC that owning Twitter has been a "rollercoaster" ride and that the experience of running it has been "quite painful". Musk also stated

that he would sell the company if the right buyer came along. Musk, who is the CEO of carmaker Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44bn in October of last year. During the interview, Musk defended his running of the company, saying that buying it was the right thing to do. However, he admitted that the workload was overwhelming and that it had been a "really quite a stressful situation over the last several months."

Musk's interview with the BBC was conducted from Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco and covered several topics, including mass layoffs, misinformation, and his work habits. He admitted that he only went through with the takeover because a judge was about to force him to make the purchase. In the conversation, Musk tried to do the interviewing as much as the other way around. When asked whether he had any regrets about buying Twitter, Musk replied that the "pain level has been extremely high, this hasn't been some kind of party".

Musk addressed his sometimes controversial tweets, saying: "Have I shot myself in the foot with tweets multiple times? Yes." He added, "I think I should not tweet after 3 am." He defended his running of the company, stating that usage of the site is up, and "the site works". He also revealed that he sometimes sleeps in the office and has a spot on a couch in a library "that nobody goes to".

Musk also addressed the recent controversy surrounding Twitter's label for the BBC's Twitter account, which was initially described as "government-funded media". Musk said that Twitter will change the label to "publicly-funded" to be more accurate, and he expressed his respect for the BBC, stating that the interview was "a good opportunity to ask some questions" and "to get some feedback on what we should be doing different."

The interview covered a range of topics, including Twitter's finances. Musk stated that the company is now "roughly breaking even" and that most of its advertisers have returned. The company's workforce has also been reduced from just under 8,000 at the time Musk bought the firm to about 1,500. He admitted that he did not fire everybody in person, saying: "It's not possible to talk with that many people face to face."

Many of Twitter's engineers have left the company since Musk bought it, raising concerns about the stability of the platform. Musk acknowledged some glitches, including outages on the site, but he said that the outages had not been for very long and that the site was currently working fine. In conclusion, Musk said that running Twitter had been a "rollercoaster" ride but that he still believed buying it was the right thing to do. Photo by Daniel Oberhaus, Wikimedia commons.