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IPFS News Link • Business/ Commerce

Elon Musk talks Tesla, Twitter, and why he tweets freely -- even if it costs him money

• https://www.cnbc.com, By Matt Rosoff, Lora Kolodny

The full interview is available to PRO subscribers here.

During the course of their approximately hourlong conversation, Musk reflected on:

How he has managed a takeover of Twitter so far and what lies ahead. Among other things, he said Twitter's Community Notes feature has cost Twitter $40 million in business when two big clients reduced spending after their ads received community notes accusing them of false advertising. He also claimed that when the acquisition closed, Twitter had negative $3 billion in annual cash flow and $1 billion in the bank. "The analogy I was using was like being teleported into a plane that's in a nosedive headed to the ground with the engines on fire and the controls don't work…."

He also defended his own tweets that were widely criticized as lending credence to conspiracies about George Soros and a recent mass shooting event in Allen, Texas, insisting "I'll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it."

His personal views and habits when it comes to work and productivity. He said he takes only two or three days off per year, works seven days a week and gets six hours of sleep a night. He also said he believes it's morally wrong for people in the "laptop class" to advocate for working from home when service workers, such as people who work in factories, still have to show up in person.

Tesla's ability to weather rocky economic cycles. Musk said that the next 12 months will be difficult for Tesla from a macroeconomic perspective because of increased interest rates pinching consumer budgets. But he also said Tesla could take advantage of Tesla's "real-time information on demand" for its cars to adjust pricing effectively.


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