Elon Musk, the world’s richest man discusses Twitter, cryptocurrency, the recession, and Trump

Elon Musk, the billionaire visionary and often precarious entrepreneur, took a more measured tone on Tuesday, predicting a possible US recession and dispelling worries about his commitment to a $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc.

Tesla Inc.’s chief executive said the electric-car maker’s employees need layoffs due to a lack of supply-chain development in an interview with John Micklethwaite, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha. Comes. He also feared the US economy was on the verge of collapsing. It’s simply a matter of when.

“A recession is inevitable at some point,” Musk warned via video hookup from the United States to the Middle East. “Whether or not there will be a recession in the foreseeable future is quite unlikely.”

Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, a rocket-launching company with nearly 100 million followers on Twitter, was far from the humorous and occasionally edgy showman who is a Twitter celebrity. The billionaire appeared to some Qatari backers of his intended takeover of the social networking platform as a businessman who was measured and respectful. Musk was dressed in a dark suit jacket and a white collared shirt at 3 p.m. in New York.

His pessimistic assessment of the domestic economy mirrors that of Nouriel Roubini and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. President Joe Biden repeated on Monday that a US recession is not imminent, and Musk has now sided with him.

Musk was forthright about his economic ideas but also cast doubt on his commitment to one of the most contentious agreements of the year, his April decision to buy Twitter.

The world’s wealthiest man stated that there are “some unsolved issues” and that he is still waiting for an answer to the question of how many bots (automated accounts, not humans) are on the social media site. Musk stated that the transaction could not be executed until the issue had been approved and the deal had been approved by shareholders.

“There’s a limit to what I can say publicly,” he said. “It’s a sensitive matter to some extent.”

Musk’s hesitancy, or unwillingness to fully back the acquisition, will not quell speculation that he is attempting to derail the sale by exploiting the bot issue. Musk said he wanted to put the deal “on pause” until he looked into how many of Twitter’s users are real individuals. He has written to Twitter management, advising them to walk away from the purchase if the firm does not do more to establish the size of its user base, according to a formal letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

With the US economy heading in the wrong direction, Musk admitted that it’s necessary to scale back Tesla’s growth in some sectors. He clarified the job losses at the Austin, Texas-based electric-car startup, saying that the number of salaried staff will decrease by nearly 10% over the next three months, resulting in a 3.5 per cent fall in overall headcount. According to Musk, the hourly labour will continue to increase.

“We grew very fast on the salaried side and in some areas we grew very fast,” he stated in the interview.

Musk, whose own net wealth is believed to be $206 billion, was not all doom and gloom.

If he gets acquired, he has the lofty goal of getting half of the world’s population to join up for Twitter. This is much bigger than his goal of 1 billion users, which he shared with Twitter employees last week. There are currently over 229 million users on the network.

Musk told the group that if Twitter is purchased, he plans to focus on “operating the product” rather than becoming CEO.

The billionaire has emerged as a political force, announcing last week that he voted Republican in a primary election in Texas for the first time. Musk has also stated that he favours Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has positioned himself as a hard conservative and Trump’s successor.