DealBook Summit 2023: Elon Musk, Bob Iger, and more

Musk’s portion has ended, the phones came out for pictures, and DealBook has come to a close. Thanks for tuning in.

We’re nearing the end of this interview, but Sorkin hasn’t yet asked Musk about X’s lawsuit against Media Matters, which reported that ads were appearing next to Nazi content.

“I’ve got a lot of fish to fry,” he said.

“I think there’s a fundamental challenge that phone makers have at this point,” Musk said, “because you’ve got basically a black rectangle, how do you make that better?”

This came right in the middle of a discussion around “free speech” on X. Over the summer, Times links on X took longer to load — Musk didn’t directly answer Sorkin’s question on whether he made a choice to punish the Times.

His response: “Free speech is not exactly free. It costs a little bit.” He referenced the Times not being a paying X user.

Sorkin is interjecting and pushing back less, the discussion is meandering, and we’re about 30 minutes over schedule. I’ve lost count of the number of times Sorkin has said, “let me ask you a different question” in order to pivot to something else.

“It should be renamed Super Closed Source for Maximum Profit AI. This is what it actually is,” he said. Musk co-founded it as a nonprofit and says its name is meant to reference open source. “I don’t know how you go from here to there, but that seems ... is this legal?”

Once again, we’re finding that definition matters when talking about AI intelligence. But if you’re talking about AI that can “write as good a novel as J.K. Rowling or discover new physics or invent new technology, I would say we’re less than three years from that point,” Musk says.

Musk says he hasn’t found anyone who knows why Sam Altman was ousted (and eventually brought back) — but believes a recent AI breakthrough could have caused the power struggle. A recent report suggested that OpenAI may have made progress towards AGI.

The DealBook stage sits in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan. The balloon letters are floating in and out of view behind the background screen outside. It’s unclear who’s behind them.

At the DealBook event, Musk tried to clarify his comments on Jewish activist groups, but I’m not sure it came across quite as he hoped — still casting blame on Jewish activists and other persecuted groups with broad and generalized accusations.

He said there are activist groups across the US who are supporting Hamas, and “a number of those organizations received funding from people in the Jewish community.” He said the problem was that they supported “persecuted groups in general” and that some of those groups “unfortunately want your annihilation.”

“Perhaps you should not fund them,” he said.

In a strange turn, we’re now watching Sorkin and Musk talk about the interior “storm” in Musk’s mind.

“Is it a happy storm?” No, says Musk. I’m not sure how we got here.

Musk says the advertiser boycott could be X’s downfall. He seems somewhere between resigned and mad.

“That will be what bankrupts the company and that is what everybody on Earth will know,” Musk said.

He gave a shoutout to Bob Iger during his “go fuck yourself” bit.

Here’s Musk responding onstage at DealBook:

I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what i meant. But those clarifications were ignored by the media and essentially I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic. And for that I’m quite sorry, that was not my intention.

He later called it, “One of the most foolish — if not the most foolish — thing I’ve done on the platform.”

Of course, when it comes to how Musk feels about the advertiser boycott in response, he isn’t so willing to acknowledge his role in the matter.

That’s Musk’s on-stage message to advertisers who he says are “blackmailing” him — i.e. the companies like Disney, Apple, IBM, and many more that are pulling ads from the platform after his antisemitic posts.

“[The trip to Israel] wasn’t in response to that at all,” Musk says of his post — it wasn’t an “apology tour.”

“I have no problem being hated.”

Musk tells Sorkin the only reason he’s here is because he’s a friend. Musk keeps laughing. The vibe is chaotic.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is talking about how long Musk has been building his businesses. “It’s not been boring, that’s for sure,” Musk said. “Actually, technically, I do have a Boring Company.”

Follow along at our Storystream:

The room here at DealBook is packed for the last session of the day — and perhaps the most anticipated one. Nobody has come up in more sessions throughout the day than Musk. X CEO Linda Yaccarino is here, too.

No surprise: “I don’t,” she tells DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Why not? “I just haven’t.”

Her commission is now suing Amazon for alleged monopoly behaviors.

Disney is one on a growing list of companies that have stopped advertising on X, formerly known as Twitter, following antisemitic posts from Elon Musk.

During his interview at the DealBook 2023 event, Bob Iger didn’t comment on whether Disney would ever go back to advertising on X, but he had this to say about the decision:

By him taking the position he took, we felt that the association with that position, and Elon Musk and X, was not a positive one for us.

Speaking during the NYT DealBook Summit 2023, he did not blame the actors' strike and lack of publicity for the film's performance. Nor did he blame the weird hatred of the film driven by sexism coming from a small and vocal cadre of Marvel fans upset over a film helmed by three women.

He did blame the sheer volume of content being created for making it more difficult to maintain quality and said, "The Marvels was shot during Covid, and there wasn't enough supervision on set" from executives.

But given that overreliance on executive creative control is one of the things that have driven the Marvel brand to its current nadir... that's certainly an interesting assessment.

Responding to a DealBook question about recent box office disappointments, Iger says, “we need to get more realistic” about what a hit looks like in the streaming age.

The Disney CEO also says it was a “definite mistake” to increase output for streaming and that an increase in quantity led to diluted quality.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is talking at the DealBook event about the business decisions behind axing projects like Batgirl. He says once money is spent on production, making a choice not to release a project and spend even more is a “strategic decision.”

What content is going to help us win? The content that wasn’t, we made a strategic decision on. It was difficult and it was painful. But I think it was the right decision for the company and it was necessary.

There was a big shock earlier this year about Huawei’s development, but Nvidia’s CEO doesn’t see it as a huge deal.

“These are just numbers. Is it really 7? Did they shrink it down to something sufficiently good that you can make a phone from? There’s no magic in these numbers. It’s just 7.”