马斯克 BBC 完整专访（2023 年 4 月 12 日）

0:18Do you see a rise in hate speech? Just your personal anecdote, do you?

0:33You see more hate speech personally?

0:38Content you don't like, or hateful. Describe a hateful thing?

1:24You can't name a single example?

1:50Then you must have at some point seen the For You hateful content.

1:55And you can't give a single one.

2:00Yes. Because you can't give a single example of hateful content. Not even one tweet. And yet you claimed that the hateful content was high.

2:21Give me one example.

2:22You literally can't give me one.

2:39You literally said you experienced more hateful content and then couldn't name a single example.

2:48Then how would you know if there's hateful content?

3:03Has BBC changed the Covid misinformation?

3:26Well, Covid is no longer an issue. Does the BBC hold itself at all responsible for misinformation regarding masking and side effects of vaccinations, and not reporting on that at all? : And what about the fact that the BBC was put under pressure by the British government to change its editorial policy? Are you aware of that?

3:59Oh, you thought it wasn't?

4:12You weren't expecting that. : All right, here we go.

4:19I believe you can.

4:44We're clearly a well-oiled machine here.

5:06I can hear you.

5:10He's put you right next to me.

5:20Yeah, that's true. Look, this whole thing only came together in a matter of hours.

5:31Yes.

5:35Sure.

5:50Yeah.

6:02Okay. And is James invited too? Well, it doesn't really matter because- Speaker 1 : Yeah, he should have received an invite. Speaker 2 : Just click accept.

6:22I don't see you listed as a speaker but perhaps you will be. We'll have to make sure that both mics are on at the same time though.

6:39Wow. Okay. We've got 200,000 people listening.

6:51Yes.

7:12It's not top secret.

7:15Great.

7:22I don't know. I like spontaneity. And there's a lot going on and it seems like... I actually do have a lot of respect for the BBC. Although I sometimes forget what the BBC stands for. What is it?

7:45Yes, I do. Yeah. So there's a lot going on. So I thought this might be a good opportunity to answer some questions, and I guess maybe get some feedback too. What should we be doing different? I know the BBC, for example, is not thrilled about being labeled state-affiliated media.

8:14Yeah. So our goal is simply to be as truthful and accurate as possible. So I think we're adjusting the label to be "publicly funded" which I think is perhaps not too objectionable?

8:41Okay. So that would be accurate. If we use the same words that the BBC uses to describe itself, that presumably would be okay. I'm not asking you for a yes or no, since you're not running BBC per se. It probably seems to pass a reasonable test.

9:04Yeah. Publicly funded. Basically we're trying to be as accurate as possible.

9:20I sometimes sleep in the office.

9:24No, no.

9:25I'm not here five days a week. But there's a library that nobody goes to on the seventh floor and there's a couch there.

9:52Yes. Whatever you want to talk about.

9:58Well, it's not been boring. It's been quite a rollercoaster. Things are going, I think reasonably well. We're seeing some all-time highs in terms of total user time. So we passed 8 billion user minutes per day, which is a lot of user minutes. : So usage is up, growth is good. The site works mostly. You know, apart from a few glitches here and there, but the site is working fairly well. And we're doing it with a small fraction of the original head count.

10:53Yeah.

11:05I mean, there have been a few outages, but not for very long.

11:16At this point I think we've got a pretty good handle on what makes Twitter work. And we're also doing it with two data centers instead of three. So we used to have three data centers. We shut down one of them. So we actually have roughly two-thirds of the prior compute capability. But we've made so many improvements to the core element. In some cases we improved the core algorithm by 80%. So the actual CPU usage or computer usage is dramatically less. : But the results speak for themselves. The system, despite being at all time highs of usage, is fast, it's responsive. It's more responsive than it was before the takeover. And we've also added long form tweets, you can now post videos up to two hours and certain videos of any length. We're rolling out our subscriber programs so content creators can actually make a living on Twitter by having some of their content behind the paywall. : And we've open- sourced the algorithms. So there's transparency about what tweets get shown, what content gets shown versus not. What are you really going to trust? Are you going to trust some sort of black box algorithm from some other site? Or are you going to trust something that you can actually see and understand?

13:03Well, many of these people have predicted that Twitter will cease to function. Their predictions have not turned out to be true. Insert Mark Twain saying, "Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated."

13:25I mean we're literally on Twitter right now.

13:43I mean it really is quite entertaining. I mean it's like a soap opera. Because when I first made the offer, the response was like the board of Dr. Poison Pill. So they were like, "Hell no, you can't buy Twitter. We'd rather die. We're like chewing on cyanide before being bought." That was their initial response.

14:10And then they said, "No, you must buy us, gun to the head. You have to buy us." I'm like, "Are you the same people who said you'd rather die than be bought?" : Doesn't that seem odd?

15:02Yes, that was literally the issue. It's like, let's say you buy a warehouse full of goods and you were told that less than 5% of the goods in the warehouse are broken. But then you actually get the warehouse, you look into the warehouse and turns out actually 25% of the things are broken. You'd be like, "Huh, that's not what you said."

15:40Yes.

15:45Yes.

15:50Yes.

16:30Yeah.

16:38Oh, fair enough.

16:42Cue a whole bunch of court cases. : "You have said in the BBC interview..."

16:57Well, I thought, "Wow, this is a really nice office building."

17:07Yes, very expensive office building, great decor. It's a lovely place and definitely is spending money like it's going out of fashion. Which is, it isn't quite going out of fashion yet. : So no, the gravity of the situation is perhaps not well understood. At the point in which the transaction closed, Twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year, and had $1 billion in the bank. So that's four months to death. So this is your starting position. How would you feel?

18:05Well that's partly why it was a $3 billion loan rate. So in rough numbers, a normal year of Twitter would do, let's say $4.5 billion in revenue and $4.5 billion in cost. I mean it was really kind of like a non-profit, they'd run it and roughly break even.

19:46It was.

20:18Okay. What would you do?

20:42I don't know.

21:12I mean people were given three months of severance, in some cases more. But like I said, the companies need to be run on their own cognizance, and it's not so easy for me to sell stock as you might think. : I have to sell stock during certain periods. I can't sell stock during other periods. So there are only brief windows where I can sell Tesla stock. And then this is often taken as some lack of faith in Tesla. Matter of fact, the Tesla stock sales caused the Tesla stock declinement, which is not good.

21:53Well, the people couldn't parse the difference between I'm selling Tesla stock because I've lost faith in Tesla - which I haven't. Or that it's desperately needed for Twitter.

22:27I don't know. He may or may not come back. But the point is that Twitter should be a town square that gives equal voice to the whole country. And ideally the whole world. It should not be a partisan politics. And the partisan politics that are the very far left of the spectrum - San Francisco, Berkeley politics -normally is quite niche. But Twitter effectively acted as a megaphone for very niche regional politics and megaphoned that to the world. : So in order for something to serve as a Digital Town Square, it must serve all people from all political persuasions provided it's legal. So close to half the country voted for Trump. I wasn't one of them. I voted for Biden. But nonetheless, free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don't like to say things you don't like. Otherwise it's irrelevant. And if at the point of which you lose free speech, it doesn't come back.

24:04Well, who's to say that something is misinformation? Who is the arbiter of that? Is it the BBC?

24:18Yes. Who is the arbiter?

24:18Yeah. So I'm saying who is to say that one person's misinformation is another person's information? The point at which you say that this is... Who is starting to decide that?

24:54Correct.

24:57Yes. Even if you aspire to be accurate, there are times where you will not be.

25:16Well, I generally... I'm often seen in that view, if the people in a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it. So for example, you cannot advocate murdering someone. That's illegal in the United States, everywhere really, I suspect. So there are limits to speech.

25:54I actually think there's less these days because we've eliminated so many of the bots which were pushing scams and spam. And previously, previous management turned a blind eye to the bot because their bonuses were tied to user growth. And if your compensation's tied to user growth, well, you're not going to look too closely at some of the users. That's part of the problem. So I think we've got less misinformation because we don't have one problem that we used to do. And we also have given a lot of attention to community notes, which corrects, with community itself, corrects misinformation.

26:57What hate speech are you talking about? I mean, you use Twitter.

26:59Do you see a rise in hate speech? Just your personal anecdote, do you?

27:14You see more hate speech personally?

27:19Content you don't like or hateful? What do you mean? Describe a hateful thing?

28:31Okay, then you must have at some point seen a before you hateful content.

28:36And you can't give us a single one.

28:41Yes, because you can't give me a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet you claimed that the hateful content was high.

29:03You literally can't name one.

29:20You literally said you experienced more hateful content, and then couldn't name a single example.

29:29Then how would you know there's hateful content?

29:44Has BBC changed its COVID misinformation?

29:50No, I'm talking about the BBC's misinformation about COVID.

30:11Well, COVID is no longer an issue. Does the BBC hold itself at all responsible for misinformation regarding masking and side effects of vaccinations and not reporting on that at all? And what about the fact that the BBC was put under pressure by the British government to change its editorial policy? Are you aware of that?

30:40Oh, you thought it wasn't?

30:53You weren't expecting that.

31:11I'm not aware of that particular situation.

31:21I don't know about that, what exactly happened with some content situation in India. The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can't go beyond the laws of a country.

31:42No. Look, if we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we'll comply with the laws.

32:05I'm not CEO anymore.

32:10No, my dog, Floki, is the CEO.

32:14He's taken over.

32:16Yeah.

32:28I don't really use TikTok. I mean, one of the reasons that I emphasize that our goal here at Twitter is to maximize unregretted user minutes or unregretted user time is that I hear many people tell me they spent a lot of time on TikTok, but they regret the time spent. And that seems like, "Okay, well, we don't want to have regretted time. We want the time to be unregretted, where you learned things, you were entertained, amused." Frankly, I get more laughs out of Twitter than anything else, and many people tell me the same thing, so that's a good sign. For TikTok itself, like I said, I just don't know enough about what's going on there. I can't say I have a strong opinion on TikTok.

33:28I'm generally against banning things, so I'd probably not be in favor. I mean, it would help Twitter, I suppose, if TikTok was banned, because then people would spend more time on Twitter and less time on TikTok. But even if it would help Twitter, I would be generally against banning of things.

34:14Do I look uncomfortable? Actually, I do. I look uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, Tesla's got activities around the world and so does SpaceX. Once in a while those things do come into conflict, but it's not like Twitter operates in China. It doesn't. Twitter is banned in China. So certainly, I've received no communication whatsoever from the Chinese government with regard to Twitter.

35:05Not all, but most. You can see it for yourself on Twitter, even in the For You feed.

35:11I mean in the, sorry, Following.

35:12Not For You because it's not, frankly.

35:18Total hate speech.

35:21Okay. Well, why don't you use For You? What's wrong with it?

35:29No, Twitter is... I'd say we're roughly breakeven at this point.

35:42I mean, depending on how things go, if current trends continue, I think we could be profitable, or to be more precise, we could be cashflow positive this quarter if things keep going well.

36:01Possibly, yeah.

36:10I think almost all of them have either come back or said they're going to come back. There are very few exceptions.

36:20I actually don't know of anyone who said definitively they're not coming back, but they're all sort of trending towards coming back.

36:27Jump in, the water's warm.

36:32Yeah. Look, if Disney feels comfortable advertising their children's movies and Apple feels comfortable advertising iPhones, those are good indicators that Twitter is a good place to advertise.

37:12Yeah, but I have to say I was wrong. He was wrong, I guess, because I was acquitted by the San Francisco jury unanimously.

37:30I think it was something that needed to be done.

39:04Yeah.

39:06That was a stetted argument.

39:08Like some people around here. This is a dangerous type of work we're in.

39:19Yeah, I mean, look, I'm been under constant attack. I mean, it's not like I have a stone-cold heart or something like that. If you're under constant criticism and attack and then that gets fed to you nonstop, including through Twitter, that is rough. Now, at the end of the day, I kind of think that if you do lose your feedback loop, that's actually not good. So I think it is actually important to get negative feedback. I don't turn replies off, and I actually got rid of... I removed my entire block list, so I don't block anyone either. So I get a lot of negative feedback.

40:25Yeah, I mean, if the media's writing nonstop stories about why you're a horrible person, it's hurtful, obviously.

41:01I literally follow the BBC on Twitter.

41:08Yes.

42:30Yeah.

42:36I must confess to some delight in removing the verified batch from the New York Times. That was great. Anyway, they're still alive and well, so they're doing fine.

43:12Well, I think the media is the driver of misinformation much more than the media would like to admit that they are.

43:20Yeah. But you are sort of saying who knows best, the average citizen or someone who is a journalist? And I think in a lot of cases, it is the average citizen that knows more than the journalist. In fact, very often when I see an article about something that I know a lot about, and I read the article, and it's like they get a lot wrong. And the best interpretation is there is someone who doesn't really understand what's going on in the industry, has only a few facts to play with, has to come up with an article. It's going to be...

44:534/20.

44:53Number will never leave me.

45:05Yes. We're going to ask for a refund.

45:22Yes.

45:29Yeah, it'll swim just fine.

45:35Well, I don't think it's necessarily a giant revenue stream. Even if you have a million people that are subscribed for, let's say, a hundred dollars a year ish, that's a hundred million dollars, and that's a fairly small revenue stream relative to advertising. What we're really trying to do here with verification is to massively raise the cost of disinformation and bots in general. So my prediction is that any social media company that does not insist on paid verification will simply be overwhelmed by advanced AI bots. I mean, ChatGPT is essentially a zillion instances of ChatGPT. How would you even know?

46:32No. The point is that you won't be.

46:38Well, then that's up to them if they... Can't make them pay, it's a small amount of money, so I don't know what their problem is. But we're going to treat everyone equally, so what we're not going to do is say that there's some anointed class of journalists who are the special ones, who get to tell everyone what they should think, that it should be up to the people what they think. And even if an article is completely accurate and comprehensive and everything, they're still, in writing that article, the media is choosing the narrative. They're deciding what to write an article about. : So I'm hopeful that this can be more a case of the public choosing the narrative as opposed to the media choosing narrative. But the media can choose narrative... At least a combination of the media and the public choosing the narrative, and the public getting to weigh in on stories if they think that they should add something to it or we've got something wrong. And over time, I think if Twitter is the best source of truth, it will succeed. And if we are not the best source of truth, we will fail.

47:57No.

48:01No.

48:02Well, I take it back. It depends on who. I suppose if I was confident that they would rigorously pursue the truth, then I guess I would be glad to hand it off to someone else. I don't care about the money, really, but I do want to have some source of truth that I can count on. And I hope that's our aspiration with Twitter, is to have a source of truth that you can count on. But it's also real time. It's an immediate source of truth that you can count on and that gets more accurate with time as people comment on a particular thing.

48:54Who do you think that might be?

48:59No. But, well, you might still have an idea.

49:07Yeah.

49:11Yeah, it's a hard job.

49:22I already have. I keep telling you, I'm not the CEO of Twitter.

49:35He's got a black turtleneck, what more do you need?

49:48I guess more Elizabeth Holmes.

49:52She's got a husky voice and a black turtleneck.

50:04Not yet.

50:10I did stand down.

50:24Yeah. Why can't we be an [inaudible 00:50:28] commune?

50:33Yeah. Was kind of bad, actually.

50:39Not yet.

50:43Not yet. No, this place is nice and I kind of like this office actually.

50:58People are dying.

51:00We should take action.

51:19We're only using one of the buildings and so the other building could be a homeless shelter.

51:26Yes.

51:30By the building owner.

51:33No. In fact, they wouldn't even let us take the W off the sign.

51:37We were quite- Interviewer : What was your plan for the shelter?

51:41I don't know. We could just let people stay there.

51:52Yeah, if the building owner lets us, we will do it.

52:00Yes.

52:10In my whole life?

52:19Well, shutting down one of our service centers was quite difficult because it turns out there were, I thought the service centers were redundant, but there were in fact a lot of things that were hard coded to this one server center. And so when we shut it down and we actually, it was quite catastrophic. We lost a lot of functionality, which sort of really rushed to put it back.

52:45That was around late December, early January.

52:51Biggest crisis, yeah.

53:01I think we're around 1,500 people at this point. And there was I think 7,800.

53:15I think it was around just under 8,000. We're about 1,500 right now.

53:21Yeah.

53:38It's not physically possible to speak to that many people.

54:06Have I shot myself under foot with tweets multiple times?

54:25I think I should not tweet after 3: 00 AM.

54:33Yeah. Well, maybe 2 AM.

54:35Yeah, something like that.

54:51Well, I think those are two good rules. Yeah, don't tweet if you're wasted or really upset about something. Yeah. A good friend of mine actually had a good suggestion and it has helped, which is that if you're going to tweet something that maybe it's controversial, save it as a draft and look at it the next day and you see if you still want to tweet it. That has been a good rule of thumb. So I've got a bunch of things in my folder that I'm glad I didn't say.

55:38What was... Hindsight's 2020, so a bunch of decisions that could have been made better for sure. But as I said, alls well that ends well. I think it's gone pretty well. So the grand scheme of things, I can't complain.

56:11That's a lot.

56:14Let's see, how do we see, okay. Let me see who... I'll just look at my tweet and see what people are saying or what questions they have. Do you like the BBC? Do you like BBC?

56:37Can I interview you?

56:51Come on.

57:18There's so many. So anyway, it's nice to be interviewed by the BBC. I have a lot of respect for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

57:31Oh, do we still say state media, whatever. It says government funded media currently as opposed to publicly funded media. Well, I guess probably we can make that change tomorrow if you'd like.

57:59Okay.

58:45I'm scrolling as fast as I can to sort of see, I guess there's some complaints about Twitter Spaces needing some improvement. Let's fix Twitter Spaces is one of the comments. People like the fact that my dog Floki is the CEO. I'm really just scrolling as fast as I can here.

59:25I do find it funny.

59:36We do [inaudible 00:59:37].

59:44No, I think that's a big factor.

1:00:00First of all, we do have people [inaudible 01:00:05] content moderation.

1:00:14Yeah, the censorship bureau was let go. I don't think the sort of putting a thumb on the political scales on the far left has been let go because that's not right. That's not what you want for a public square. You've got to have equal treatment for people from across the political spectrum. : So some of them are going to be upset about that. But like I said, my experience is that there's less misinformation these days, not more. And that the Community Notes feature is extremely powerful for addressing so-called misinformation.

1:00:57Yes.

1:01:02Diamond mine?

1:01:09Yeah. My father never owned a... So you're thinking of an emerald mine.

1:01:14Yeah. I'd like to see a picture of the alleged emerald mine.

1:01:19Yeah.

1:01:20No, but he never owned a emerald mine.

1:01:26No.

1:02:18The Community Note may be referring to a thing where I went on a trip with my father to Zambia, but I never saw any mine or anything.

1:02:42If they're referencing an article, then the article may not be wrong, which they're still... Community Notes is not going to be perfect. The batting average of Community Notes I found to be extremely high.

1:03:08Yeah.

1:03:19Really? Yes. Really. But look, the acid test is, people will use the system and find it to be a good source of truth or they don't. And no system is going to be perfect in its pursuit of the truth. But I think we can be the best, the least inaccurate. That's our goal. The least inaccurate. And I think we might be there already. If we're not there, we'll be there soon.

1:03:56Well, we have all time high usage, so I don't think it has been.

1:04:04Yes. Well, they're probably the same people who predicted that Twitter would cease to exist and their predictions have turned out to be false.

1:04:17No, I think it's great. It's way better.

1:04:25I was looking for questions. You got any questions? Speaker 3 : Here's people that have a question.

1:04:32Okay. Speaker 3 : [inaudible 01:04:39].

1:04:51Let's hear from Doge Designer. Okay, so what do I do? Speaker 3 : Cool.

1:05:01Do I tap it again? Speaker 3 : Yeah, he's muted.

1:05:10Okay. How do you unmute? Speaker 3 : He just needs to.

1:05:12Okay. Doge Designer, if you unmute, you can talk. Speaker 4 : Hey Elon, what's up? Can you hear me?

1:05:19Let's unmute Jason and David as well and us. Definitely Walter Isaacson if he does want to speak. Speaker 3 : Bring up Alex too.

1:05:35Yeah, sure. We'll get a few people going here.

1:05:44I know. It was so good, we keep going.

1:05:52Yeah, it's true. Speaker 3 : All right.

1:06:52Yeah, during this kind of transition period, we're extra vigilant about impersonation. So I agree that over time if somebody has a trusted track record, they should be able to change their name and profile picture without losing the blue check. During this transition period, we want to be, just like I said, extra vigilant against impersonation. So that's why we're being so rigorous in this regard. : Now, if somebody has organizational affiliation, they can't change their name or picture without losing the verification check because they're cross verified with their organization. So I really would encourage people to get organizational verification as much as possible. And then we're going to add, so you can have multiple organizational affiliations. : I think this is going to be really powerful for avoiding impersonation. I've heard from a lot of people that impersonation is a serious issue, actually more on other platforms than Twitter. And I think that if you can say that you really do belong to... If some organization can say that you really do belong to them, that's a great way to address impersonation risk.

1:08:16I can, yes. Speaker 5 : How's it doing?

1:08:21Good. How's it going? Speaker 5 : All good. I'm flying to US tomorrow. I just have a couple of questions for you. One is like I will be asked why you are here in US. So what should I tell them? I'm here to visit Twitter headquarters or just Titter headquarters?

1:08:34Yeah. Well, yeah, I would recommend adding the W for the SRTs. Speaker 5 : For sure. For sure. And second question is, will I be able to meet the Twitter CEO there or no?

1:08:49Sure. Speaker 5 : Perfect. Can't wait. And I just have one message for James, you know the number of people in this Twitter space so you should be a responsible reporter. You are claiming that you are seeing a lot of hate speech, but you could not even give a single example. So I just request you to be a responsible speaker.

1:09:12So let's see. David or Jason, I don't know if you guys can speak, you're welcome to if you'd like.

1:10:32Well, you're getting favorable treatment right now.

1:10:38No. In fact, the algorithm is open sourced so you can see exactly what's going on.

1:10:47Following is just who you follow. It's not algorithm, it's just- Interviewer : There's still an algorithm. Yeah, there's still an algorithm. What you see, you don't see every single- Elon Musk : No, in following, you should see all the tweets of people that you follow. If not, there's a bug in the system.

1:11:05Yeah. Following is literally the thing they say when they say it. There shouldn't be any algorithm interaction there. So it's hard to actually see. I definitely see some room for improvement from a functionality standpoint because when you have a really big spaces, it's actually hard to even see who's requesting to speak because there's so many. Speaker 3 : You can add there, but there are people that will request right here.

1:11:48Okay. It's a long list. It's a long list. Speaker 3 : Max like 60 I think.

1:11:52Oh, okay. Speaker 3 : At a time.

1:12:00Okay.

1:12:00What about him?

1:12:19Yeah, real realtime doxing of locations is not okay.

1:12:25No, it's just realtime doxing is not allowed because- Interviewer : But if I take a picture of someone in the street and then tweet it, is that doxing?

1:12:36It's against their will and you're following them around, then yeah, that would be doxing.

1:12:54No, it wasn't.

1:12:59He was using non-public information combined with public information.

1:13:18Actually, no. It just was unevenly enforced.

1:13:23So there's a no doxing rule. It was unevenly enforced. In fact, in general, part of the issue with the prior management of Twitter is they have all these rules, but they'd only enforce them against some people and not against others.

1:13:36Yes, where they are.

1:13:47If you can't recognize them, then it's not a thing.

1:14:27Okay. Do you want to leave?

1:14:29Yeah, maybe I will.

1:14:42Yeah, that sounds good.

1:14:49Oh, you're welcome. Speaker 6 : So that was fun, Elon.

1:15:43No, not really. And I actually didn't even have a burner account. I do have a second account at this point because I need to test the app before it goes out so it's like a beta test account. But no, I don't have a burner or anything like that. Yeah, never have had. Speaker 6 : So also, no, Pierre, what was that guys name?

1:17:12Well, it seems like everyone and their dog is buying GPUs at this point. It's kind of getting to the point where you're going to have to buy GPUs in a back alley. So there's certainly a lot of people buying GPUs. Twitter and Tesla are certainly buying GPUs and we're also working on Dojo. So I think there's a lot of potential there with Dojo that people don't realize. Speaker 6 : Actually I do have a question and well, I guess people keep DMing me. They're wondering what's the future of the Twitter files? Do you still have any journalists working on these things or no?

1:17:56Yeah, at a certain point we need to move on from the Twitter files, but I think there's a few things left, but generally I think there's not a lot that I'm aware of that's left. So it's mostly just like, let's just move on to the future. Speaker 6 : That's fair, yeah. I think that's more or less true. What are your thoughts on companies like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok following Twitter's footsteps? I think Facebook recently did a verification thing for $15, which is double the price. What's your thoughts on that?

1:18:33Yeah, like I said, my opinion is that any social media organization that does not insist on paid verification will be worthless because at this point, take Instagram for example, you can generate an infinite number of thirst pics using Midjourney and for very little. And at this point, modern AI can pass any human verification test. So the only solution that I can think of is to increase the cost of fake accounts. So if somebody's paying on the order of $8 a month, that's $100 a year, and they also need to get a credit card and a phone number from a reputable carrier. So then it's much harder to create a million bots, whereas if you don't require those things, it's trivial, frankly, to create a million bots and they'll all seem very human and will take very little computing effort to do so. So that's why I think basically any social media that does not require paid verification will basically cease to be relevant. Speaker 6 : Makes sense. Speaking of generative content, is it possible for you guys to add a flag that says that, "Hey, this video or this image is..." I make a lot of AI generative content, and a lot of it looks real. I put one of Donald Trump making out with Gavin Newsom, and a lot of people thought it was real- Elon Musk : Oh, God. Speaker 6 : Yeah, on the timeline.

1:20:13You [inaudible 01:20:14] anything, it looks pretty real, including the voice. That can get the voice matched and the video matched. It's really getting to the point where it'll be quite easy to generate extremely realistic fake videos, images and so forth and voice. I saw a fake Joe Rogan interview and it really sounded like Joe Rogan's voice. I sent it to Joe and he was like, "Whoa, this is crazy." So yeah, I think verification is going to be extremely fundamental in the future. That's why we're so focused on it. Speaker 6 : So the reason I brought that up is as a content creator, I'd like to keep making those, and I don't want to necessarily fool people. So would it be possible to, I don't know, add a flag to it so that content creators can say, "Hey, this is AI generated content. Don't take it seriously, it's a parody,"?

1:21:09Well, I think in the tweet, in the post, I think it would be advisable to say that this is not real if it is something that can be potentially misinterpreted. Speaker 6 : Okay.

1:21:23It was crazy how viral that picture of the Pope with the awesome jacket- Speaker 6 : Balenciaga?

1:21:30Yeah- Speaker 6 : Oh, there was one of Joe Biden falling off the airplane. I [inaudible 01:21:36] that one.

1:21:55Yeah, it's amazing. And actually, even the AI fashion is great. Speaker 6 : Right. If I was a fashion designer, I'd be taking ideas from this because the stuff that makes- Elon Musk : Absolutely. Speaker 6 : ... actually original.

1:22:11The AI fashion is incredible. So can we just print that somehow or make it, because it's amazing. Speaker 6 : Maybe you should patent the idea, just have an AI fashion generator thing that prints them out and I think there's craft or something, the clothing manufacturer thing that you can sort of do it at home. Patent that.

1:22:40But yeah, there's really some amazing AI generator clothing. It's really cool. And I really love that one with the Pope and that went viral. A lot of people thought that the Pope actually had that outfit, which is not totally out of the question because there's a lot of amazing fashion in Italy. So it's possible that some fashion house made a really epic coat for the Pope. But that was obviously AI generated. We're headed into a weird world here. Speaker 6 : We are, video games.

1:23:12Where trying to figure out what's real is super hard. Speaker 6 : Yeah, I've fooled millions of people with the one of Joe Biden falling off the airplane.

1:23:57Yeah, so here at Twitter we're going to be very focused on figuring out what's real, and if it's not real, then trying to address it. Speaker 6 : I think [inaudible 01:24:11] has been doing a great job of covering the news four hours ahead of the AP. So that's a big plus for Twitter that you have citizen journalists now who are able to cover this stuff hours before anybody else.

1:24:24Yeah, if you want the realtime news, this is the best place is Twitter. And like I said, any given source of information is going to have some degree of inaccuracy, and we can just aspire to make that as small as possible and iterate towards being closer to the truth over time. That is our goal. Speaker 6 : That's a good goal.

1:24:50Yeah, that's a good goal. But we're definitely not going to assert that everything you see on Twitter is true because it isn't.

1:25:04... be very skeptically, any organization that claims to be completely truthful, because they're not and so that very claim is false. So I think it's important to reflect on what mistakes we're making and try to make fewer of them in the future. Speaker 6 : Unlike media. Speaker 7 : Could you tell us about X Corp? Is this just something that's a legal thing that you had to do, or is there maybe something more to it?

1:25:38There is something more to it. Speaker 6 : Yeah. Speaker 7 : You want to tell us what it is?

1:25:47Like I said, my goal is to create X the everything app. That's the goal. It's what we're working towards. Speaker 7 : Nice, and Twitter is, what, a first step?

1:25:56Twitter is an accelerant to X the everything. Speaker 6 : What does that mean?

1:26:02Well, I guess you'll have to stay tuned to find out. Speaker 7 : Oh, I love it. Speaker 6 : For another episode. I've canceled my Netflix- Speaker 7 : Tune in next [inaudible 01:26:12]. Speaker 6 : ... Twitter. Twitter's taken my time. Yeah. Thank you for that. It's very entertaining.

1:26:54Yeah, yeah. Totally. Exactly. Honestly, Twitter is troll heaven. Speaker 6 : Oh, hell yeah. A lot of the media's going to hate it because they want to control space and [inaudible 01:27:09]- Elon Musk : It's totally troll heaving on Twitter. And the thing is, I even get trolled and I'm like, God, why did I get trolled again? That was really dope. Speaker 6 : Right? I get trolled every day and it's like part and parcel of being on Twitter.

1:27:23Yeah, totally. Speaker 6 : It is worth it.

1:27:45[inaudible 01:27:46] vote or something.

1:27:54No- I think criminal is over the top there. I would agree with that that they went too far. If that's the standard for throwing someone in prison, then there should be a lot of people in prison. Speaker 6 : Yeah. What are you in prison for?

1:28:12Meanwhile, there's like murders running free, so it's crazy.

1:28:32Yeah. Really something needs to be done about the crime situation in San Francisco. It's really [inaudible 01:28:37]. Speaker 7 : The area around Twitter's headquarters especially is like zombie apocalypse is the perfect way to describe it.

1:28:43Yeah, literally. It's like people think maybe you're exaggerating. I'm like, no, you can just definitely come here any day of the week, including 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon. We're not talking midnight stuff. Literally mid-morning driving into Twitter, it looks insane. So people can just come here and see it with their own eyes, it's next level. Speaker 6 : Or watch the videos on Twitter because it's safer.

1:29:16Yeah. Speaker 6 : As sad as it is. Man, every single day.

1:29:21It's intense. You're like, whoa.

1:29:30Really?

1:29:31Outside Twitter?

1:29:33What are you doing, pointing camera at the sign or something?

1:29:40Really? Are you serious?

1:29:42Okay. Why? Because it sort of gives an ambiance or something?

1:29:48I know. Well, I suppose I have seen a few things where there's people doing interviews with the Twitter sign in the background, and I guess that's more interesting than just being in a studio or something.

1:30:02Okay, sure.

1:30:07But the W is now a background color, so... Speaker 6 : Titter.

1:30:14Look, I held a pole and there was a strong yes on Titter, removing the W. Speaker 8 : Right, you've got to [inaudible 01:30:21] bit of people, popular Vox Day.

1:30:22Exactly.

1:30:27No, look, I said I would appoint a new CEO and I did, and it's my dog. I don't know what people have against dogs? They're fine. Dogs are great. Speaker 6 : They hate dogs.

1:30:36Only dog haters would be opposed to making the dog a CEO. Speaker 6 : I see people saying, oh, you promised to quit and step down. I'm like, "Well, no, the dog's the CEO. Floki is the CEO."

1:30:46Yeah, the dog's the CEO. What are you complaining about? It's great dog. Speaker 6 : There are towns where the mayor's the dog, right? They elect a dog because all the people suck and it's the same thing.

1:30:56Yeah. Speaker 6 : Dog's always cool.

1:30:58Yeah, he's got great instincts. Speaker 6 : Yeah. Oh, man.

1:31:08Anyway, I hope people have a good time on Twitter and learn things. And like I said, the acid test is under regretted user time, and if under regretted user time is growing, then we're doing the right thing. Speaker 6 : It's good. I like to hear that. I love Twitter and good to see things go onward and upward.

1:31:24All right, sounds good. Well, good talking guys. I'll head back to work and thanks for all your feedback.

1:31:33Wow, 3 million? Speaker 6 : Yeah.

1:31:36Amazing. Speaker 6 : Yeah.

1:31:44This is Elon Musk interviewing the BBC.

1:31:57Okay. Well, thanks for [inaudible 01:31:59]. Speaker 6 : Fun time.

1:32:00Yeah.

1:32:03You're most welcome. All right, thanks. Signing off guys. Speaker 6 : Bye-bye.