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.
During the course of their roughly hour lengthy dialog, Musk mirrored on:
- How he has managed a takeover of Twitter to this point and what lies forward. Among different issues, he mentioned Twitter’s Community Notes function has price Twitter $40 million in enterprise when two huge shoppers lowered spending after their advertisements obtained neighborhood notes accusing them of false promoting. He additionally claimed that when the acquisition closed, Twitter had detrimental $3 billion in annual money circulation and $1 billion within the financial institution. “The analogy I used to be utilizing was like being teleported right into a aircraft that is in a nosedive headed to the bottom with the engines on hearth and the controls do not work….”
- He additionally defended his own tweets that have been extensively criticized as lending credence to conspiracies about George Soros and a current mass capturing occasion in Allen, Texas, insisting “I’ll say what I would like, and if the consequence of that’s dropping money, so be it.
- His private views and habits when it involves work and productiveness. He mentioned he takes solely two or three days off per 12 months, works seven days every week and will get six hours of sleep an evening. He additionally mentioned he believes it’s morally wrong for folks within the “laptop computer class” to advocate for working from dwelling when service staff, resembling individuals who work in factories, nonetheless have to indicate up in particular person.
- Tesla’s capacity to climate rocky financial cycles. Musk mentioned that the next 12 months will be difficult for Tesla from a macroeconomic perspective due to elevated rates of interest pinching shopper budgets. But he additionally mentioned Tesla might benefit from Tesla’s “real-time info on demand” for its vehicles to regulate pricing successfully.
- He believes the Fed is going to be too slow to lower interest rates when the financial system slows, and that may damage shopper demand. “You can consider elevating the Fed fee as considerably of a brake pedal on the financial system, frankly,” Musk mentioned. “It makes lots of issues dearer. So if the automotive cost or your property mortgage is absorbing extra of your month-to-month funds then you’ve gotten much less money to purchase different issues.”
- What would occur to the worldwide financial system if China makes a move to control Taiwan. “The Chinese financial system and the remainder of the worldwide financial system are like conjoined twins. It can be like making an attempt to separate conjoined twins. That’s the severity of the scenario. And it’s truly worse for lots of different corporations than it is for Tesla. I imply, I’m 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 only because he wanted a non-commercial alternative to Google’s growing dominance in AI. He expressed disappointment that the corporate has deserted its non-profit roots. And he mentioned he is not associates with Google co-founder Larry Page. “The closing straw was Larry calling me a ‘species-ist’ for being pro-human consciousness as a substitute of machine consciousness.”
- His political beliefs, 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 mentioned he voted for Biden however hinted he wasn’t pleased along with his selection, saying “I want we might have only a regular human being as president.”
