Thread by @xDaily

NEWS: Elon says Twitter 2.0 has entered its comeback arc, in a new interview at the WSJ CEO council summit.

He also hints his new AI company, X . AI, may have a similar relationship to Tesla and Twitter like OpenAI has to Microsoft.
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More from the interview with Elon:

- Twitter may reach cash flow positive next month.
- Twitter will be hiring, already has started to hire some new staff
- Will Twitter be a public company again in 5 years? Elon says “I don’t know”.

(will update the thread with more soon)

Elon says he believes AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will happen this decade, in the next 3-6 years.

He also adds that X . AI is intended to be a third major player between OpenAI and DeepMind - more details on this project are coming soon, he says.

Elon comments on his work schedule: He tends to prefer to spend a whole day working on each of his companies. Today for example is mainly a Tesla day, though he will be at Twitter later. Tomorrow will be a Twitter day. He has some Twitter meetings scheduled for later.

Twitter has got rid of “well over 90%” of scams and bots on the platform post-acquisition, Elon says. It is now much harder to operate an effective bot farm on Twitter.

The team has also been able to defeat almost all of the “troll armies” that used to brigade certain topics.

Elon confirms he has spoken with Linda on that he will continue to speak his mind using his Twitter platform, and she’s happy with that. He also says, on their approach to content moderation, she is aligned with him on the goal of sticking close to the law in each country.

Elon explains Twitter 1.0 was focused on a metric called mDAU (monetizable daily average users), but when this was examined more closely, many of these "users" would never actually visit Twitter ; they might see a notification on their phone but never click into the site.

Post-acquisition, Twitter 2.0 now instead tracks “true user seconds” of screentime, reported to Twitter by iOS, Android and the web browser - for mobile, this counts the amount of time the app is in the foreground. Elon says this is the “most rigorous way” to assess this.

Elon on overstaffing at pre-acquisition Twitter: “There were a lot of people [at Twitter 1.0] doing things that didn’t seem to add a lot of value.”

He also says that’s probably true of most Silicon Valley companies, though maybe not to the same degree as at prior Twitter.

Elon: In any company there are people that help move things forward, and people who try to slam the brakes.

He says Twitter 1.0. was in a situation where in a meeting with 10 people, 1 would bring an accelerator and 9 would bring a set of brakes.

In contrast, Elon says Twitter is now “gung-ho” about launching new features, even if there’s a bit of risk (not too serious) to site stability.

Elon: "We have introduced more functionality in the last 6 months than Twitter has in the last 6 years."

Interviewer: Do you regret buying Twitter or are you happy you bought it?

Elon: Well, all’s well that ends well.

Interviewer: Has it ended well yet?

Elon: I think we’re, hopefully, on the comeback arc.

We might add a bit more later, but here's the full interview. Worth a listen, pretty solid questions from the interviewer and some good answers.

twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

CLIP: Elon explains how paid verification with Twitter Blue will make it massively harder for bots to manipulate the platform.

https://twitter.com/cb_doge/status/1661103152115109888

Here's a Youtube upload of the full interview

Elon says "almost all" advertisers will return, and thanks ad agencies for removing their warnings on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/alx/status/1661132297029001217

Elon on X/Twitter's future revenue streams:

He says advertising will always play a role in X's revenues, but at some point, eg 10 years from now, it may not play the largest role. It will be the largest source for atleast the next few years.