Running Twitter 'quite painful', firing people 'not fun at all': Elon Musk

Elon Musk on Wednesday said that he bought the microblogging platform Twitter because he had to and running it has been "quite painful". In an interview with BBC, Musk said that since he bought the platform for $44 billion last year, advertisers have either come back or have said that they would.

Musk also said that when he took over the company, it had just under 8,000 employees, now they are down to 1,500. He said that firing people is "not fun at all" and, at times, can be "painful".

Since the takeover, Musk has introduced sweeping changes to Twitter. He has laid off entire teams including the external communication team. In some cases layoffs were abrupt, and people found themselves logged out of their official email accounts.

Musk admitted this in the interview and said that he doesn't fire everyone in person.

"It's not possible to talk with that many people face to face," Musk said.

He added that Twitter's goal is to be the "most accurate" platform that it can be.