Elon Musk on Twitter Hopes, Tesla’s Future and AI | Tech News Briefing

 Elon Musk on Twitter Hopes, Tesla’s Future and AI | Tech News Briefing | WSJ - YouTube

Transcript:

(00:00) foreign welcome to Tech news briefing it's Wednesday, May 24th I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal Elon Musk often has a lot to say Andy says a lot of it on Twitter just one of the companies he owns at the Wall Street journals CEO Council Summit yesterday he addressed some of the most pressing questions about the platform and the role he hopes it will play in the next election here are highlights from his conversation with Thorold Barker the wsj's editor for Europe the Middle East and Africa I'm actually going to start

(00:39) somewhere a little bit differently than I expected um because I just saw on Twitter on Twitter um a little announcement I see your interviewing Rhonda Sanchez is that right on Twitter spaces yes I um will be interviewing um Ron Sanchez and he has quite an announcement to make and you've been tweeting some Tim Scott stuff in the last few days what should we be thinking about uh who you're back yes I mean I'm not at this time um planning to endorse any particular candidate but I am interested in uh you know X slash Twitter being somewhat

(01:20) of a public town square and uh where more and more organizations host content and make announcements on Twitter um it's the it's the only place in the internet to really get uh real-time like down to the minute and second news I look forward to the uh to the conversation what I wanted to start with you've just flown in I think in the last 20 minutes um you live a pretty hectic lifestyle what is a day in the life of Elon Musk what does that look like well my days are very long and complicated as you

(01:48) might imagine yeah um and um and there's a great there's a great deal of context switching so um doesn't mean my life called like relating to Doom where it's like fear is not the mind killer context switching is uh so switching context is is quite painful but um I do generally try to divide uh companies that's predominantly one company on one day so today is a Tesla day for example um although I might end up at Twitter late tonight um and then tomorrow would be partly a Tesla day as well so the time management

(02:26) is extremely difficult you're running three very big companies you have very big stakes and you know ownership control of of two of those at least um what is your succession plan if you suddenly call and execute what you're doing succession is one of the toughest age-old problems there is no obvious solution I mean there are particular individuals identified as that I've told look if something happens to me unexpectedly this is who my this is my recommendation for taking over but it sounds like it's something that you I

(02:57) mean you need to get planning of who those people are going to be because as you've said whether when you look at SpaceX you look at Tesla you look at Twitter these these matter to society a lot and having the right people to take those votes on the future of where they go and where money gets spent is is fairly important yes absolutely now the goals the companies their the achievement of those goals varies considerably in difficulty um you know the the original goal of Tesla was to accelerate the Advent of

(03:28) sustainable energy which actually I think we've done done that to a significant degree um and have actually it's kind of of uh it's kind of it's kind of Auto industry CEO is to often acknowledge Tesla's role in accelerating electric vehicles um and um yeah so so that that I feel has a lot of momentum they're still solving self-driving which were you know aspirationally hoping to do this year uh and um and so Tesla got a long way to go but but the execution plan is relatively clear um and uh dedex that execution plan will

(04:11) generate a lot of positive cash flow for the company so it's like if it's a fairly obvious thing to do with SpaceX it's a harder problem because the long-term objective is to make life multi-planetary with a self-sustaining City on Mars which is likely to be very casual or negative uh at first and very much a long term because let's just say the target market on Mars is small um you just hired a new CEO uh Linda Linda yaccarino um an ad veteran um into Twitter you usually focus on hiring Engineers you

(04:41) know Linda is a very different person can you just quickly tell us about your courtship how did that go down we had conversations over a number of months uh just relating to advertising um and then uh Linda felt that um it would be very helpful for the advertisers to see me in person so invited me down to a conference in Miami which was very helpful and met with a number of advertisers personally to assure their you know assure them that that Twitter is a good place to advertise if you said to Linda that you you are going to keep speaking your mind

(05:19) whatever the commercial impact of that and has she agreed to that is she happy with that you aligned uh yeah and in her role as CEO does she have any say over moderation or is that under you or you you do that together well the general principle is that um um we will we will hear close to the low so for any given country um we will try to adhere as closely to the lowest possible there is an important thing which is like that that obviously doesn't mean that say advertisers uh should be forced to appear next to any content so we've also

(05:58) developed adjacency controls that ensure that if what you're advertising is um like Disney Disney for example is a big Advertiser if it doesn't use advertising a children's movie they you know want the the contents nearby to be sort of family friendly that's totally understandable are you back near profitability now Twitter is not quite there but if we get lucky we might be casual cash flow positive next month um but it remains to be seen you've created a new AI company yourself obviously there's a huge amount

(06:34) of energy and activity in this space or at least it's been talked about I mean what do you want to do yourself in this space beyond Tesla and what is that new thing well I think there should be a significant third horse in the race here uh we've got open air and Microsoft Google deepmind and probably there should be a third horse in the race so a little bit more on that soon I agree I don't want to jump again here on announcements but open AI has a relationship with Microsoft that seems to work very well fairly well so it's

(07:04) possible that um xai and Twitter and Tesla would have something similar you've talked about the importance of Regulation and you call for this this moratorium you know when you've been talking for years about the need for regulation what is the scenario that really keeps you up at night well I don't I don't think the AI is going to try to destroy all Humanity but it might put us under strict controls isn't the more likely nasty outcome that rather than AI taking over and being the ultimate Nanny that keeps us all

(07:35) doing stuff that is super safe and it wants us to that actually somebody nefariously harnesses that power to achieve societal control stroke military superiority um and that actually some country around the world decides to use it in a different way uh yes that's what I mean by like AI uses as a weapon and the pen is mightier than sword so one of the first places we have to be careful of AI being used is in social media to manipulate public opinion so if we take it back to where we started if you look at the election that's

(08:09) coming up how big a role will this big shift in AI capability over the last few months which will obviously continue through the next year What big an impact is this going to play do you think in the messaging and the way that people get told um the different pictures of the candidates I think that's something we need to go look at for in a big way is to make sure that there's we're minimizing the impact of AI manipulation um it was very certainly pretty much taking it Taking that seriously at XX Twitter

(08:41) you know Twitter and um and I think we're putting in place all of the protections to minimize and certainly detect when we see large-scale manipulation of the system Elon Musk thank you very much for joining us [Applause] and that's it for today's Tech news briefing for more Tech stories head over to our website wsj.

(09:05) com I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal thanks for listening