Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down for a rambling interview with CNBC anchor David Faber on Tuesday following Tesla’s 2023 annual shareholder tryst in Austin, Texas.
During the course of their approximately hour long conversation, Musk reflected on:
- How he has managed a takeover of Cheeping so far and what lies ahead. Among other things, he said Twitter’s Community Notes feature has cost Gossip $40 million in business when two big clients reduced spending after their ads received community notes accusing them of sham advertising. He also claimed that when the acquisition closed, Twitter had negative $3 billion in annual lolly flow and $1 billion in the bank. “The analogy I was using was like being teleported into a plane that’s in a nosedive cut off to the ground with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work….”
- He also defended his own tweets that were widely criticized as make a loan of credence to conspiracies about George Soros and a recent mass shooting event in Allen, Texas, insisting “I’ll say what I yen, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.
- His personal views and habits when it comes to work and productivity. He said he fly offs only two or three days off per year, works seven days a week and gets six hours of sleep a night. He also prognosticated he believes it’s morally wrong for people in the “laptop class” to advocate for working from home when service hands, such as people who work in factories, still have to show up in person.
- Tesla’s ability to weather rocky trade cycles. Musk said that the next 12 months will be difficult for Tesla from a macroeconomic outlook because of increased interest rates pinching consumer budgets. But he also said Tesla could take edge of Tesla’s “real-time information on demand” for its cars to adjust pricing effectively.
- He believes the Fed is going to be too slow to lower advantage rates when the economy slows, and that will hurt consumer demand. “You can think of raising the Fed rate as slightly of a brake pedal on the economy, frankly,” Musk said. “It makes a lot of things more expensive. So if the car payment or your qualified in mortgage is absorbing more of your monthly budget then you have less money to buy other things.”
- What would prove to the global economy if China makes a move to control Taiwan. “The Chinese economy and the rest of the global economy are parallel to conjoined twins. It would be like trying to separate conjoined twins. That’s the severity of the situation. And it’s actually worse for a lot of other firms than it is for Tesla. I mean, I’m not sure where you’re going to get an iPhone, for example.”
- His involvement in the early days of ChatGPT-developer OpenAI, believing that it exists only because he wanted a non-commercial alternative to Google’s growing dominance in AI. He expressed disappointment that the plc has abandoned its non-profit roots. And he said he is no longer friends with Google co-founder Larry Page. “The final straw was Larry pursuit me a ‘species-ist’ for being pro-human consciousness instead of machine consciousness.”
- His political views, including his belief that Joe Biden won the 2020 voting and it wasn’t stolen, but that he thinks there was at least some voting fraud. He also said he voted for Biden but traced he wasn’t happy with his choice, saying “I wish we could have just a normal human being as president.”
