Twitter boss Dorsey asks Elon Musk for 'feedback' on improving the service

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey has asked one of the platform's most famous and controversial users, Elon Musk, how the service could be improved.

During a staff event this week, Mr Dorsey held a video call with the billionaire boss of SpaceX and Tesla, who he previously called "the most exciting" person on Twitter.

Mr Dorsey asked: "Give us some direct feedback, critique, what are we doing poorly, what could we be doing better, and what's your hope for our potential as a service?"

"If you were running Twitter - by the way do you want to run Twitter?" Mr Dorsey said to some laughter. "What would you do?"

The SpaceX boss stressed authenticity and said it would be "helpful to differentiate" between real accounts and those run as part of botnets or organised trolls.

"How do you tell if the feedback is real or someone trying to manipulate the system, or probably real or probably trying to manipulate the system?" he said.

He added: "I'm sure you guys see it all the time - people trying to manipulate the system, trying to sway public opinion, and sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what's real public opinion and what's not.

"You know, what are people actually upset about, versus manipulation of the system by various interest groups - and there are many, many such groups."

Mr Musk is well known for his tweets and recently won a defamation case after he described a British man as a "pedo guy".

He was also at the centre of a Twitter-based cryptocurrency scam last year, in which criminals exploited his identity to steal money from his fans .

In another scandal prompted by his fondness for the platform, Mr Musk was sued after tweeting about plans to take Tesla private in a record $72bn (£56bn) transaction.

After settling a fraud lawsuit with US regulators, he agreed to step down as the company's chief executive.

His "false and misleading" tweets caused Tesla's share price to jump more than 7%, before plummeting more than 10% the day after the legal action was announced.

Mr Musk also told Twitter's chief executive that he thought the first tweet from Mars would be sent "pretty soon".

He suggested the Mars Rover could send one "right now" in terms of technology - although there is an Earth-based human tweeting on its behalf at the moment.

There would, however, be a bit of a wait before the first person could tweet from the Red Planet: "I think the earliest date for the first person is probably five years from now, but I think it's probably not more than nine years from now," Mr Musk said.