Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down for a sprawling interview with CNBC anchor David Faber on Tuesday following Tesla’s 2023 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas.
Throughout the course of their roughly hour prolonged dialog, Musk mirrored on:
- How he has managed a takeover of Twitter thus far and what lies ahead. Amongst totally different points, he talked about Twitter’s Neighborhood Notes operate has worth Twitter $40 million in enterprise when two enormous purchasers decreased spending after their commercials acquired neighborhood notes accusing them of false selling. He moreover claimed that when the acquisition closed, Twitter had unfavourable $3 billion in annual cash motion and $1 billion inside the monetary establishment. “The analogy I used to be utilizing was like being teleported right into a airplane that’s in a nosedive headed to the bottom with the engines on fireplace and the controls don’t work….”
- He moreover defended his private tweets which were broadly criticized as lending credence to conspiracies about George Soros and a contemporary mass taking photos event in Allen, Texas, insisting “I’ll say what I need, and if the consequence of that’s shedding cash, so be it.
- His private views and habits with regards to work and productiveness. He mentioned he takes solely two or three days off per yr, works seven days every week and will get six hours of sleep an evening. He additionally mentioned he believes it’s morally unsuitable for folks within the “laptop computer laptop class” to advocate for working from dwelling when service staff, similar to individuals who work in factories, nonetheless have to point out up in individual.
- Tesla’s potential to climate rocky financial cycles. Musk mentioned that the subsequent 12 months will probably be troublesome for Tesla from a macroeconomic perspective due to elevated rates of interest pinching shopper budgets. However he additionally mentioned Tesla may benefit from Tesla’s “real-time information on demand” for its vehicles to regulate pricing successfully.
- He believes the Fed goes to be too gradual to decrease rates of interest when the economic system slows, and that can harm shopper demand. “You may think about elevating the Fed value as significantly of a brake pedal on the monetary system, frankly,” Musk mentioned. “It makes a great deal of points dearer. So if the car price or your property mortgage is absorbing additional of your month-to-month value vary then you could have a lot much less money to buy totally different points.”
- What would occur to the worldwide economic system if China makes a transfer to regulate Taiwan. “The Chinese language monetary system and the rest of the worldwide monetary system are like conjoined twins. It may be like attempting to separate conjoined twins. That’s the severity of the situation. And it’s actually worse for plenty of totally different companies than it’s for Tesla. I indicate, I’m uncertain the place you will get an iPhone, as an illustration.”
- His involvement within the early days of ChatGPT-developer OpenAI, saying that it exists solely as a result of he needed a non-commercial various to Google’s rising dominance in AI. He expressed disappointment that the corporate has deserted its non-profit roots. And he mentioned he’s not pals with Google co-founder Larry Web page. “The final straw was Larry calling me a ‘species-ist’ for being pro-human consciousness in its place of machine consciousness.”
- His political opinions, together with his perception that Joe Biden received the 2020 election and it wasn’t stolen, however that he thinks there was at the least some voting fraud. He additionally mentioned he voted for Biden however hinted he wasn’t completely satisfied along with his alternative, saying “I need we might have solely a daily human being as president.”
Originally posted 2023-05-17 01:20:04.