Elon Musk told the BBC that he has cut about 80% of staff since taking over Twitter

Hong Kong (CNN) Elon Musk He has laid off more than 6,000 Twitter people since taking over the company, he told the BBC in a rare interview late Tuesday.

Musk was quoted as saying in interview The social media platform now has just 1,500 employees, down from under 8000 who were working at the time of the acquisition. The reduction equates to approximately 80% of the company’s employees.

It’s “not fun at all” and can sometimes be “painful,” the billionaire CEO told the British broadcaster at Twitter’s San Francisco head office.

The second richest man in the world said that “draconian action” was needed when he joined the company, because the company was facing a “negative $3 billion cash flow situation”. leave it Twitter (TWTR) He estimated that he had only “four months to live”.

“This is not care [or] indifferent situation. “If the whole ship sinks, no one will ever get a job,” Musk said.

musk Twitter bought compared to $ 44 billion last October.

After initially offering to take over the company in April 2022, he has tried to get out of the deal, citing concerns about the number of bot accounts it holds. Since then, he’s made a sweeping overhaul of Twitter: firing its top executives, cutting jobs, and legislating new policies About how to verify or classify user accounts.

Since then, he told the BBC, Twitter is now “almost” breaking even and advertisers are returning to the platform.

Musk also pledged to revise the label applied to British broadcasting, from “government funded” to “public funded” after the BBC objected.

Label has been added during the Weekend. The BBC protested the move, saying it was “independent and always has been”.

“The British public finances us through license fees,” she said at the time.

Musk too Weighs on US Check for TikToksaying that although he is not a user of the Chinese-owned app, he is usually “against blocking things”.

“I mean, I suppose it would help Twitter, if TikTok got banned, because people would spend more time on Twitter and less time on TikTok,” he said.

“But while it would help Twitter, in general I would be against blocking things.”

Musk also cracked jokes during the interview, saying he was “no longer the CEO of Twitter” and had been replaced by his pet dog, a Shiba Inu named Floki.