Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down for a sprawling interview with CNBC anchor David Faber on Tuesday following Tesla’s 2023 annual shareholder assembly in Austin, Texas.
Through the course of their roughly hour lengthy dialog, Musk mirrored on:
- How he has managed a takeover of Twitter thus far and what lies forward. Amongst different issues, he stated Twitter’s Group Notes function has price Twitter $40 million in enterprise when two huge shoppers diminished spending after their advertisements obtained neighborhood notes accusing them of false promoting. He additionally claimed that when the acquisition closed, Twitter had unfavorable $3 billion in annual money move and $1 billion within the financial institution. “The analogy I used to be utilizing was like being teleported right into a airplane that is in a nosedive headed to the bottom with the engines on fireplace and the controls do not work….”
- He additionally defended his personal tweets that had been broadly criticized as lending credence to conspiracies about George Soros and a current mass taking pictures occasion in Allen, Texas, insisting “I will say what I would like, and if the consequence of that’s dropping cash, so be it.
- His private views and habits with regards to work and productiveness. He stated he takes solely two or three days off per yr, works seven days per week and will get six hours of sleep an evening. He additionally stated he believes it is morally incorrect for individuals within the “laptop computer class” to advocate for working from house when service employees, equivalent to individuals who work in factories, nonetheless have to point out up in particular person.
- Tesla’s skill to climate rocky financial cycles. Musk stated that the subsequent 12 months might be troublesome for Tesla from a macroeconomic perspective due to elevated rates of interest pinching shopper budgets. However he additionally stated Tesla may make the most of Tesla’s “real-time info on demand” for its automobiles to regulate pricing successfully.
- He believes the Fed goes to be too sluggish to decrease rates of interest when the economic system slows, and that may damage shopper demand. “You’ll be able to consider elevating the Fed price as considerably of a brake pedal on the economic system, frankly,” Musk stated. “It makes a variety of issues dearer. So if the automotive fee or your house mortgage is absorbing extra of your month-to-month finances then you’ve gotten much less cash to purchase different issues.”
- What would occur to the worldwide economic system if China makes a transfer to manage Taiwan. “The Chinese language economic system and the remainder of the worldwide economic system are like conjoined twins. It could be like attempting to separate conjoined twins. That is the severity of the state of affairs. And it is truly worse for lots of different firms than it’s for Tesla. I imply, I am undecided the place you are going to get an iPhone, for instance.”
- His involvement within the early days of ChatGPT-developer OpenAI, saying that it exists solely as a result of he needed a non-commercial different to Google’s rising dominance in AI. He expressed disappointment that the corporate has deserted its non-profit roots. And he stated he’s now not buddies with Google co-founder Larry Web page. “The ultimate straw was Larry calling me a ‘species-ist’ for being pro-human consciousness as an alternative of machine consciousness.”
- His political opinions, together with his perception that Joe Biden gained the 2020 election and it wasn’t stolen, however that he thinks there was at the very least some voting fraud. He additionally stated he voted for Biden however hinted he wasn’t glad together with his alternative, saying “I want we may have only a regular human being as president.”