'I will sell company if...': Elon Musk breaks silence on Twitter's chaotic takeover

Chaotic takeover: Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who took over the microblogging site earlier last year, said running the platform has been "quite painful" and a rollercoaster".

While speaking to BBC on Wednesday, Musk, who bought Twitter for $44bn in October, did not lament over the chaotic takeover but added he would sell the organisation if the "right" person came along. 

"No regrets"

During the conversation, he defended his logic behind buying the social media company and said he had no regrets about buying the platform. However, he acknowledged that the "pain level has been extremely high, this hasn't been some kind of party". 

"It's not been boring. It's been quite a rollercoaster," he said while explaining his idea at Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco. "It has been really quite a stressful situation over the last several months", he added.

"Has to sleep in the office sometimes"

The world's second-richest man asserted that the workload has been really challenging and added he has to sleep in the office. Musk revealed that he has a spot on a couch in a library "that nobody goes to". When asked about his controversial tweets, he sarcastically said he would not tweet after 3 am. 

Is BBC "government-funded media"?

While clarifying Twitter's stance over labelling BBC's main Twitter account as "government-funded media", he gave a cryptic answer and said, "I know the BBC is generally not thrilled about being labelled state media."

"Twitter is adjusting the label for the BBC to "publicly-funded. We're trying to be accurate," he said.

What happened to 'verified' users?

Earlier today, he announced a deadline for the 'legacy' account holders to either pay or lose their blue check mark.

He declared April 20 as the last day for "verified" users to continue their account with the blue tick-- a symbol earlier used to authenticate notable personalities including journalists. During the interview, he stuck to what he mentioned in his microblogging post.

Earlier, Musk had set the deadline as March 31 for the legacy account holders to get the subscription. But, without detailing further, the microblogging site extended the date. 

Twitter Blue is priced differently for every region and based on how you sign up. In the US, it costs USD 11 a month or USD 114.99 a year for iOS or Android users and USD 8 a month or USD 84 a year for web users.

Chaotic takeover

It is worth mentioning ever since the SpaceX CEO took over the platform following dramatic circumstances at the San Francisco-based headquarter, he has been making major changes in Twitter policies. Within hours of his taking charge, he fired the Indian-American CEO Parag Agrawal and later kick out other top employees from the organisation.

Later, he announced the paid subscription model, wherein the verified accounts have to pay for the "blue checkmark" which is often called the "blue tick". 

This created a major setback for both the platform and Musk, as several companies lost billions of dollars due to their accounts. This resulted in Musk temporarily suspending his idea but later came up with a new plan wherein he categorised the verified accounts as per the genre.

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