Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes.
CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images, Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair via Getty Images
Elon Musk insisted multiple times during a BBC interview that his dog is Twitter’s CEO.
Musk quipped that his Shiba Inu, Floki, is the one in charge of the company.
He also said he dresses his dog in a black turtleneck, like Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk told the BBC that his dog Floki is the CEO of the social media platform and that he dresses it in black turtlenecks — the outfits disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was known for wearing.
During a live interview on Twitter Spaces with BBC journalist James Clayton, Musk kept correcting Clayton when the latter called Musk Twitter’s CEO.
“I’m not the CEO of Twitter. My dog is the CEO of Twitter. He’s a great dog, very alert, and it’s hard to get anything by him,” Musk joked.
Responding to Clayton’s earlier question of who Musk’s successor as CEO would be, he again insisted that Floki had secured the position.
“He’s got a black turtleneck, what do you need?” Musk said in the interview, which took place at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Tuesday night.
Clayton asked Musk: “Steve Jobs or Elizabeth Holmes, are you making a reference to?”
“I guess more Elizabeth Holmes. He’s got a husky voice,” Musk said.
Holmes is the former CEO of the failed blood-testing startup Theranos. She was convicted in January 2022 and sentenced in November to more than 11 years in prison on four wire fraud charges.
On Monday, a judge denied her request to remain free while appealing her conviction. She is scheduled to report to prison on April 27.
The BBC interview was one of several occasions that Musk has joked about his dog being Twitter CEO. In February, he tweeted a photo of the Shiba Inu sitting at a desk, wearing a black shirt with the word “CEO” on it.
“The new CEO of Twitter is amazing,” Musk wrote in his tweet on February 14.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 15, 2023
Musk’s affection for his dog has even pushed him to change Twitter’s interface.
On April 3, Musk replaced Twitter’s bird logo with the Shiba Inu — or doge — meme. Following this change, the price of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that Musk supports, soared 20%.
A separate meme cryptocurrency token named after his dog Floki rose 200% in value this year, beating out other Musk favorites like dogecoin and Shiba Inu.
Musk has owned a wide range of pets other than his Shiba Inu. He once had a dog named Hobbes — after Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher — which was a Yorkshire Terrier that Musk called “nasty, brutish & short.”
In April 2019, Musk tweeted that he has “a big dog called Gatsby, a little dog called Marvin the Martian & a cat named Schrödinger.”
X, Musk’s son with the singer, Grimes, was also seen playing with Floki and two other dogs in a tweet posted in August.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 1, 2022
Musk and a representative for Holmes did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.