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.
In the course of the course of their roughly hour prolonged dialog, Musk mirrored on:
- How he has managed a takeover of Twitter so far and what lies ahead. Amongst totally different points, he talked about Twitter’s Group Notes perform has worth Twitter $40 million in enterprise when two large 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 throughout 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 hearth 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 would like, and if the consequence of that’s shedding cash, so be it.
- His private views and habits on the subject of work and productiveness. He stated 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 stated he believes it’s morally unsuitable for folks within the “laptop computer laptop class” to advocate for working from dwelling when service employees, reminiscent of 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 shall be troublesome for Tesla from a macroeconomic perspective due to elevated rates of interest pinching client budgets. However he additionally stated Tesla may reap the benefits of Tesla’s “real-time information on demand” for its automobiles 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 may damage client demand. “You’ll be able to think about elevating the Fed value as significantly of a brake pedal on the monetary system, frankly,” Musk stated. “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’ll 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 state of affairs. And it’s actually worse for many totally different corporations than it’s for Tesla. I indicate, I’m uncertain the place you’re going to get an iPhone, as an example.”
- 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 stated he’s not associates with Google co-founder Larry Web page. “The final 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 received 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 joyful along with his selection, saying “I would like we might have solely an everyday human being as president.”
