What is Elon Musk doing at Twitter?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2022
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elon Musk has begun laying off staff at Twitter, a week after taking sole control of the company. He says he’s “freed the bird” but does freedom of speech on the platform come at the price of political stability and threats to democracy?
Lewis speaks to a range of guests from the tech industry, including a founding member of Twitter, Jason Goldman.
Planning: Melissa Tutesigensi
Socials: Georgia Foxwell
Video: Will Gibson-Smith
Production: Gabriel Radus
Deputy Editor: Tom Hughes
Executive Producer: Ellie Clifford
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | Last week when we spoke, Elon, I asked you whether you were thinking of taking it of. |
| 0:17.9 | You said, no way. |
| 0:18.8 | I do not want to own Twitter. It is a |
| 0:21.6 | recipe for misery. Everyone will blame me for everything. What on earth's changed? |
| 0:27.0 | No, I think everyone will still blame me for everything. Yeah. If I acquired a Twitter and something |
| 0:33.1 | goes wrong, it's my fault. 100%. I think there will be quite a few arrows. That was the man of the |
| 0:39.4 | moment, Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman speaking at a TED talk in April this year. It's funny, |
| 0:46.3 | isn't it? This figure bestriding the political and tech worlds right now, colossus-like, all eyes on him. |
| 0:53.1 | And yet he sounds so halting, so hesitating, |
| 0:56.2 | so unlike the Brewera and online brawn, he so readily flashes, even just this week, |
| 1:01.8 | arguing with Democrat, Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez, or Stephen King, or the Blue Tick Brigade, |
| 1:07.7 | he so often enjoys baiting and chastising. And maybe that's because he is a more |
| 1:13.3 | complicated character than he seems, less omniscience than people seem to want him to be. And in this |
| 1:20.1 | episode, on a day where the New York Times reported that Donald Trump is going to announce a |
| 1:25.0 | 2024 run for the presidency after the midterms, a man who owed |
| 1:30.0 | so much to a platform which came to expel him. We're going to explore what is happening at Twitter, |
| 1:36.1 | a day as well when thousands of Twitter employees felt Musk's new might and are out of a job |
| 1:43.0 | like Simon Balmain, who until today worked for the company in Birmingham and to whom we spoke earlier this afternoon. |
| 1:50.0 | We got an email very late last night, in the early hours of the morning, UK time, basically confirmed the rumours that we heard that there was going to be a large reduction in headcount. |
| 2:00.0 | If we were to be affected by it, we would adhere to our personal emails and if not, to our work |
... |
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