Elon Musk wants ‘80 percent of humanity on Twitter’

"We really want to be, as I've mentioned before, [a sort of] digital town square ... that is as inclusive as possible," Musk told Twitter's client solutions leader, Robin Wheeler. "Can we get 80 percent of humanity on Twitter and talking [in a] sort of positive way."

During the meeting with Wheeler, Musk spoke about Twitter's tremendous untapped potential and how he would like for the site to be viewed in the future.

He expressed a need for people to exchange words instead of violence, and to have "maybe once in a while people change their minds."

"The overarching goal here is like how can we make Twitter a force for good for civilization," Musk continued, "to be a good thing in the world."

Musk has faced much backlash in recent weeks from a number of public figures, some of whom have made a big show of deactivating their Twitter accounts, though he has also received plenty of support alongside that.

Musk addressed some of the controversies that caused some of that criticism, such as the $8/month blue checkmark verification.

"There's hundreds of millions of fake accounts that are created every year on Twitter," Musk stated. "The issue is that creating a fake account is just extremely cheap. It's maybe a 10th of a penny or some very small amount of money. By charging $8 a month, it raises the cost of a bot or a troll by somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand."

Musk announced that he would be purchasing Twitter at the beginning of the year in an attempt to counter censorship in social media and to protect free speech. He officially took the helm last month and has since made a number of changes to the social media site.

"Truth is signal and falsehood is noise. And we want to improve the signal to noise ratio as much as possible. There'll be some bumps along the road here, but I think in the long run, this will work out extremely well."