Elon Musk's X: The Twitter takeover a year on
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After many months of news headlines about whether Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter, he eventually completed the purchase on 27 October 2022.
Since then, the company’s been through some big changes; laying off most of its 8000 employees, a rebrand to ‘X’, and reinstating some previously banned accounts on the platform.
Mr Musk describes himself a free speech absolutist and says he bought Twitter – now called X - to create a space where “a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.” However, the company’s faced criticism over lax content moderation, leading to advertisers halting ads on the service. He hopes to boost revenue by making the site a paid-for platform, setting himself some ambitious financial targets.
In this episode, Sam Fenwick speaks to former employees, business owners and journalists to get a picture of what has happened at X since Elon Musk took over.
(Picture: Elon Musk next to a logo for X - formerly known as Twitter. Credit: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Produced by Amber Mehmood and Hannah Mullane
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love Janessa is the true crime podcast from the BBC World Service and CBC podcasts, |
| 0:06.6 | investigating the murky world of online romance scams. |
| 0:10.1 | She was trying to get me to send her money. |
| 0:12.8 | Catch up with the whole series now. |
| 0:14.9 | Search for Love Janessa wherever you found this podcast. |
| 0:18.4 | You win their hearts, you win their wallet. |
| 0:21.9 | Well, it's not been boring. |
| 0:26.0 | It's been quite a roller coaster. |
| 0:28.3 | He paid $44 billion, laid off eight in ten workers, |
| 0:32.9 | changed its name, and reinstated people who had been banned. |
| 0:36.7 | Twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year and had $1 billion in the bank. |
| 0:44.1 | So that's four months to death. |
| 0:46.0 | An X now marked the spot where Twitter used to be. |
| 0:50.3 | It's 12 months since Elon Musk bought one of the world's largest social media networks. |
| 0:56.1 | The pain level of Twitter has been extremely high. |
| 1:00.1 | This hasn't been some sort of party. |
| 1:02.3 | So how successful has his tenure been? |
| 1:04.9 | I'm Sam Fenwick, and today on Business Daily from the BBC World Service, |
| 1:09.4 | we're looking back at the social media platform, |
| 1:12.3 | formerly known as Twitter. |
| 1:16.2 | Cast your mind back to this time last year. |
| 1:23.0 | Elon Musk, one of the world's wealthiest people bought the social media platform Twitter. |
... |
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