this is bbc news. the headlines. police have made almost 120 arrests in relation to disruption at the grand national horse race, after animal rights activists delayed the start by storming the track. the race was eventually won by corach rambler, ridden by derek fox. at least three people have been killed in sudan — in heavy fighting between the army and paramilitary forces, in the capital khartoum. the doctors union has called on humanitarian organizations to provide medical assistance to the injured. the british government is banning the construction of new

so—called "smart" motorways — which use measures such as variable speed limits to improve traffic flows. fourteen stretches of carriageway have already been paused or cancelled because of concerns over costs and safety. at ten o'clock we will be here with a full round up of the day's news. first, the interview: elon musk. it's not every day you get invited by one of the world's richest and most influential people to a sit—down interview. earlier on tuesday, i'd received a response to an e—mailfrom mr musk. "let's do an interview tonight," it read. just a few short hours later, we were setting up in twitter�*s headquarters in san francisco. hello, how are you doing? really nice to meet you, too. we are about to go live, very surprisingly, we only just found this out, on twitter, that that is elon musk. we didn't know about that, but you never know with elon musk.

there's a lot going on, so i thought this might be a good opportunity to answer some questions and maybe get some feedback, too. what should we be doing different? i know the bbc, for example, was not thrilled about being labelled state—affiliated media. n ot exa ctly. i was going to get that later, but let's go for it now. it has officially objected to that term. do you want to respond to it? yeah, yeah. our goal is simply to be as truthful and accurate as possible, so i think we are adjusting the label to be "publicly—funded," which i think is perhaps not too objectionable. we're trying to be accurate. i am not the bbc, but... publicly—funded is how the bbc describes itself. so, that would be accurate.

if we use the same words that the bbc uses to describe itself, that, presumably, would be ok. i am not asking you for a yes or no, because you are not running the bbc per se, but it seems to pass a reasonability test. so you're going to change those labels on the bbc twitter feed, and also npr's as well? yeah. publicly—funded. we are trying to be as accurate as possible. all right, fine. first of all, i just want to clear something up. are you sleeping in the office, here? i sometimes sleep in the office. like, five days a week? three days a week? i'm not here five days a week. there is a library that nobody goes to, on the seventh floor, and there is a couch there and i sleep there sometimes. 0k, 0k. in terms of the general overview,

the reason why you have agreed to do this is because you wanted to talk about the first six months as chief executive owner of twitter. yeah, it's kind of like, whatever you want to talk about, you know? so, how do you think it has gone? well, it has not been boring. it has been quite a roller—coaster, so... things are going, i think my reasonably well. things are going, i think reasonably well. i think, reasonably well. we are 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. we have had 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 headcount. you mentioned outages there.

there have been several, and we have actually spoken to an engineer who works at twitter, and they said that the plumbing is broken here and it is on fire and there could be problems at any minute. do you accept that? i mean, there have been a few outages, but not for very long. and it's currently working fine. it doesn't keep you up at night that twitter might go offline again? at this point we've got a pretty good handle on what makes twitter work, and we are also doing it with two data centres instead of three. so we used to have three data centres, we shut down one of them. we are actually at two thirds of the prior compute capability. we've made so many improvements to the core algorithm and in some cases we've improved the core

algorithm by 80%, so the actual cpu usage is dramatically less, so... but the results speak for themselves. the system, despite being at all—time highs of usage is fast. it is more responsive than it was before the takeover, and we have also added longform tweets. we've added... you can now post videos up to two hours, soon videos of any length. we are rolling out our subscriber programme so that people can, content creators can actually make a living on twitter by having some of their content behind a pay wall. and we've open—sourced the algorithm so there is transparency about what tweets get shown. what content gets shown versus not. i think, what are you really going to trust? do you trust some black box algorithm from some other site, or are you going to trust the thing you can see and understand? do you accept there are lots

of engineers that are looking at the way twitter is built, and the lack of engineers, because so many have left, and are worried about the health of twitter? well, i mean, there have been... many of these people have predicted that twitter will cease to function. their predictions have not turned out to be true. you know, insert mark twain saying, "rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated." let's go back six months. i mean, we are literally on twitter right now. so it must work. let's go back six months and even further back than that. when you put that initial bid in, you then had a wobble. you kind of said, "i actually don't want to buy twitter any more." it really is quite entertaining, like a soap opera, because when i first made the offer the response was the board had

offered a poison pill, so they were like, "hell no, you can't buy twitter, we'd rather die." "we'll, like, chew on cyanide before being bought," that was their initial response. and then you said, "actually i don't want to buy it..." and 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 would rather die than be bought?" doesn't that seem odd? so, i guess my question to you is, you said that the reason was because of bots, because twitter was filled with bots. looking back at it now, was there a little bit of you that thought, "actually, maybe i've overpaid and actually maybe i don't want to do this, i want to get out of this?" be honest. the problem was that the publicly stated user numbers were in excess of the real user numbers, so... i've heard you talk about that,

but basically, looking back at it now, was that the only reason that you wanted to pull out? yes. that was literally the issue. let's say you buy a warehouse and you are told that less full of goods, and you are told that less than 5% of the goods in the warehouse are...broken. in the warehouse are broken. then you actually look in the warehouse and it turns out 25% of the thing is broken. you would be like, "huh, that's not what you said." so then you changed your mind again and decided to buy it. i kind of had to. did you do that because you thought a court would make you do that? yes. right. yes, that is the reason. so you were still trying to get out of it and you were advised by lawyers, "look, you're going to have to buy this." yes. interesting.

so you didn't, you didn't actually want to purchase it, even when you said you were going to? well, not at that price. i think the analogy is pretty close. there is a warehouse full of goods. they say less than 5% of what's in the warehouse is broken, but then you walk into the warehouse and you see actually it is 25%. so you may still want to buy what is in that warehouse, but probably at a lower price. not buying the stuff that is broken. so you didn't have an epiphany. you just thought, "i'm going to have to buy this, i might as well bite the bullet?" yeah. it is not super complicated. i'm not sure you have said that before. cue a whole bunch of court cases. "you said this in the bbc interview, blah—blah, etc."

you then came into twitter with a sink. what were your first impressions? well... i thought, "wow, this is a really nice office building." expensive? yes, a very expensive office building. great decor. it is a lovely place. and definitely spending money like it is going out of fashion, and it isn't quite going out of fashion yet. the gravity of the situation is perhaps not too well understood of, you know, at the point where the company, the transaction closed, twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year, and had i billion in the bank

so that is four months to death, so that is the starting position. how would you feel? it was pretty intense, you know? you also had to borrow quite a lot of money and pay interest on that too. that was why it was a $3 billion loan rate. in rough numbers, a normal year twitter would do $4.5 billion in revenue, $4.5 billion in cost. it was kind of like a nonprofit and they'd run it at roughly break even. but that is not bankruptcy. you're not saving that company from bankruptcy if it is breaking even. but then the issue is that if you then add half $1 billion but then the issue is that if you then add half a billion dollars of debt servicing and have a massive drop in revenue, which we did, which is partly cyclic and partly political concerns and whatever, so revenue dropped by over a third, notjust twitter, you know, facebook and google also saw facebook

and google also saw significant advertising revenue declines. it's been a little higher on twitter, but a lot of the advertisers are coming back, so there is a cyclic drop which is still pretty significant, but in rough numbers, revenue dropped from 4.5 billion to three, and expenses went from 4.5 to six, creating a $3 billion negative cash flow situation, and twitter having $1 billion in the bank, that is four months to live. so, unless drastic action was taken immediately this company was going to die. let's talk about that drastic action, because almost immediately you sacked a lot of twitter workers. and i spoke to them, it was very easy to speak to them when it happened, and the way, they said, pretty much everyone said, is it felt quite haphazard and it felt a little bit uncaring. i wouldn't say uncaring. the issue was, like,

the company is going to go bankrupt if we do not cut costs immediately. this is not a caring—uncaring situation. if the whole ship sinks, then nobody�*s got a job. right. but a lot of people just lost theirjobs like that. and they didn't even know they'd lost theirjobs, often. they were just frozen out of their accounts. so, let me ask you, what would you do? well, you might want to give someone some notice. by the way, i'm not running twitter. i know. this is the criticism, and this is what staff members say. a little bit of notice... no, i understand. if you have four months to live, 120 days, in 120 days, you're dead. so what do you want to do? how much are you worth? i don't know. we're talking about around the $200 billion mark. you are framing it like it had a few months to live. you are quite a rich man. i sold a lot of tesla stock to close this deal. i did not want to sell

the tesla stock. 0k. do you have any regrets about the way some staff were let go? i mean, people were given three months of severance, in some cases more. so, like i said, companies need to run on their own cognizance. and it is not so easy for me to sell stock as people 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 this is often taken as a lack of faith in tester and in fact, the tesla stock sales caused the tesla stock to plummet which was not good. do you think those two were connected? well, people couldn't parse the difference me selling because i lost faith in tesla,

which i haven't, or because it was desperately needed for twitter. and after that, after you let go of a lot of staff, twitter became slimmed down a lot, then you started making a lot of policy decisions, and one of that was to bring donald trump back. he hasn't actually tweeted yet. do you expect him to come back at any point, have you spoken to him? i haven't spoken to him. he may or may not come back. but the point is that twitter should be a town square, 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 more partisan politics politics, and moreover partisan politics that are on the very far—left of the spectrum.

san francisco politics is normally quite niche but twitter effectively acted as a megaphone for very niche regional politics and megaphoned that to the world. in orderfor something to serve as a digital town square it must, you know, serve all people, from all political persuasions. provided it is 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 is irrelevant. and at the point at which you lose free speech, it does not come back. the issue some people have is that a lot of people were brought back, some people were brought back who were previously banned for spreading things like qanon conspiracies. you had people like andrew tate who were brought back, who were previously banned for things hate speech. do you think you prioritise freedom of speech over misinformation and hate speech?

well, who is to say that something is misinformation? who is the arbiter of that? is that the bbc? are you literally asking me? you are the arbiter on twitter, because you own twitter. i'm saying, who is to say? 0ne person's misinformation is another person's information. the point at which you say, "this is misinformation..." but you accept misinformation can be dangerous, that it can cause real—world harms, that it can potentially cause... the point i make is that the bbc itself has at times published the point i'm trying to make is that the bbc itself has at times published things that are false. do you agree that has occurred? i am quite sure the bbc had said things that have turned out not to be true in its 100 year history. even if you aspire to be accurate, there are times

where you will not be. i think ithink immigrants i think immigrants scheme of things the bbc does aspire to be accurate. —— in the grand scheme of things. but you accept there has to be a line in terms of hate speech. you're not looking at total 100% unrestricted speech? i'm generally of the opinion that if the people of 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 is illegal in the united states and probably everywhere, i would expect. so there are limits to speech. taking your argument to a logical conclusion, then, do you accept there is more misinformation on the platform if it is not being policed in the same way? i actually think there is less these days because we have eliminated so many of the bots

which were pushing scams and spam. previous management turned a blind eye to the bots because their bonuses were tied to user growth, and if your competition is tied to user growth, then you're not going to look too closely at some of the users. that is part of the problem. so i think there is less misinformation because we don't have the bot problem that we used to. we also have given a lot of attention to community notes which corrects, the community itself, corrects misinformation, and it has been very effective. i would onlyjust add that we have spoken people who have been sacked that used to be in, content moderation and we've spoken

to people very recently that have been involved and they say there is not enough people to police the stuff particularly around hate speech in the company. what hate speech are you talking about? you use twitter. have you seen a rise in hate speech? just your personal anecdote. i don't. tiktok has also been in the news, and there is talk about the biden administration banning it orforcing a sale. what is your view? i don't really use tiktok. one of the reasons i emphasised that our goal here at twitter is to maximise unregretted user minutes and unregretted user time is that i hear many people tell me they spend a lot of time in tiktok but they regret the time spent and that seems like, 0k, 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 think i get more laughs out of twitter than anything else, and many people tell me the same thing so that is a good sign.

for tiktok itself, ijust don't know enough about what is going on there. i can't say i have a strong opinion on tiktok. you don't have opinion on whether it should be banned or not? you know, i'm generally against banning things. so i probably would not be in favour. 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 though that, even if it would help twitter, i would be generally against the banning of things. 0k. do you feel, sometimes, that your many business interests might get in the way of you having an opinion? for example, tesla has major connections in china. you would not have a certain opinion on something or feel uncomfortable about saying something because of your other business interests elsewhere?

do i look uncomfortable? actually, i do, i was trying to look uncomfortable. tesla has got activities around the world and so does spacex, and once in awhile those things do come into conflict. but it is not like twitter, you know, operates in china. it doesn't, it was banned in china. certainly, i have received no communication whatsoever from the chinese government with regard to twitter. in terms of advertising, twitter is not a private company any more, so we don't really know how it's all going. have all the advertisers come back? not all, but most. you can see it for yourself on twitter, even in the for you feed. i mean in the following feed. you should not use for you because it sucks. filled with hate speech, i am told.

that's not what i said. 0k, fine, well why not use for you? what is wrong with it? how is it going? is twitter in profit now? no, i would say we are roughly breaking even at this point. and you said before you see a world where it could be in profit. is there a timeline on that? depending on how things go, if current trends continue i think we could be profitable... to be more precise, we could be cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well. i want to talk about if you have any regrets and, you know, i think you were booed at a dave chappelle concert. a little. some say little, some say a bit more.

i think your own lawyer said you couldn't get a fair trial in san francisco because there are lots of people don't necessarily like you here. i have to say, i was wrong, or he was wrong, i guess, because i was acquitted by a san franciscojury unanimously, so... do you have any regrets buying twitter? i think it was something that needed to be done. it has been quite difficult, you know, i would say the pain level of twitter has been extremely high, it hasn't been some sort of party, so it has been really quite a stressful situation for the last several months, not an easy one. apart from the pain, it has been quite painful but at the end of the day, were many mistakes along the way? of course.

but all is well that ends well, and i feel like we are headed to a good place, and we roughly break even, we are trending towards being cash flow positive very soon, literally in a matter of months. the advertisers are returning. i think the quality of recommended tweets has improved significantly, and we've taken a lot of feedback from people who've looked at the open source recommendation algorithm, and we've made a lot of improvements even since that was made open source, and we're going to keep doing that, so overall i think the trend is very good so, you know... can you talk me through the emotional strain of this? look, i have been under constant attack. it is not like i, you know, have a stone—cold heart or something like that. i don't turn replies off

and i removed my entire block list, so i don't block anyone either. so somebody can... i get, like, a lot of negative feedback but i think it is actually good to get negative feedback. when you talk about the emotional strain and you've gone back to feedback, is that the thing that has been most difficult to take, the sort of negative feedback? if the media is running nonstop stories about how you are a horrible person, it is hurtful. 0bviously. hello. we've had some heavy showers developing through the day across parts of east yorkshire, east anglia and south—east england. out to the west, this bank of cloud has been gradually working its way eastwards, turning the skies hazy across western areas and bringing some patchy light rain and drizzle into northern ireland and the western isles. and that will continue to slowly push its way eastwards through this evening and overnight.

the light rain and drizzle will become increasingly patchy and, eventually, tend to fizzle out. some clearer skies at first across eastern counties, the showers fading here. but, equally, we could also see some mist and some fog under those clear skies, and it will be a chilly night for parts of east anglia and south—east england. temperatures perhaps down to two or three celsius. elsewhere, temperatures generally holding up to between four and eight celsius. 0n into sunday, and we're underneath this area of high pressure, and we start to pull in more of a southerly wind. so a milderair direction, pushing that milder air across the uk. but also a moister direction, so we will see much more cloud through sunday. and, actually, a fairly grey start for many on sunday. a lot of cloud out west with some patchy rain and drizzle. mist and low cloud for the hills too. any early mist and fog for eastern coastal counties will tend to lift and, actually, we'll see some sunshine developing here, and that too will tend to extend north and westwards through the day. so we will see some spells of sunshine coming through the cloud and, where we do, temperatures rising to 16, maybe 17 celsius. so then, through sunday evening, it's a fairly quiet night,

but also, once again, a fairly cloudy night, so that will keep the temperatures up a little bit higher. and then, for the week ahead, well, it's looking mainly dry for most of us. very little, if any, rain across the uk. some good spells of sunshine. and actually, for many, away from eastern coasts, with the breeze off the sea, it will be feeling a litle bit warmer. so this is how monday shapes up. once again, we're under this area of high pressure, keeping the atlantic fronts at bay. still a fair amount of cloud around on monday morning. some mist and some murk, particularly for western areas, and perhaps even still some drizzle through the day for the western isles and parts of north—west england. but for many, it's a mainly dry day. and, actually, once we've got rid of the cloud through the morning, we should see some spells of sunshine come the afternoon. and, again, that will help temperatures quite widely into the low mid—teens, if not 16 or 17 celsius in the best of sunshine. and, actually, as i mentioned earlier, for much of the week ahead, it's looking mostly dry, with some spells of sunshine. and after what's been been a fairly cool and wet week, things are looking a bit warmer too.

the racecourse at aintree. more than 100 people have been arrested. the start of the steeplechase had to be delayed. the perimeter of the course is 11—5 kilometres, so, to have a resource, whether it be security, or police officers, staff, at every point on the course, is extremely difficult. we'll have the latest from aintree. also tonight: coordinated strike action involving doctors and nurses isn't ruled out,