Disney's "Epic" Deal, Biden's Memory, and Guests Zoë Schiffer and Kurt Wagner

23:22Because to think that this wasn't going to go crazy in the media, and I think we're going to zero in on this shit, was just not to be honest with the impact. I thought the media could have done a much better job because Trump has been saying, like literally at Pennsylvania and then North Carolina, he said a series of incoherent things. I think the point I was trying to make, actually on Chris Wallace, the show, because they were like, this is a big problem. I'm like, are you, Trump, you know, he's not as, Trump isn't as bad. I'm like, almost worse because he says incoherent things. We've gotten used to it, Trump.

23:52He lies so much that we don't think it's cognitive decline. Someone wrote, Trump is incoherent and occasionally is coherent, and Biden is coherent and is occasionally incoherent. But more than that, Biden has always had gaffes, right? He's definitely old, no question. He has more gaffes than ever. He always has gaffes. Trump is getting increasingly insane. And that's like, it reminds me, And the reason I think Biden gets more attacked for it is because he's that I'm thinking of a nursing home. He's the nice guy in the nursing home and occasionally can't find his apartment. Right. That kind of like I'm going to use a metaphor.

24:28Trump is the guy in the in the cafeteria who accuses everyone of stealing his fork or his Jell-O or whatever. The reason he seems more vigorous is because he's louder. But that doesn't make him any less cognitively disabled. Right. He's just seems vigorous. And that's true. But the crazy one in the nursing home is the one I'm worried about. The loud one is the one I'm worried about. And not the sort of friendly old guy who's effective, by the way, speaking of which. Now, the day, let me just say, the day after his comments encouraging Russia to do whatever the hell they want to any NATO country, it doesn't mean defense guidelines.

25:08This is a dangerous, incoherent person who already was problematic. The NATO Secretary General said Trump's words could undermine security and put American and European forces at risk. These comments, and Nikki Hill even said this kind of comment that makes Joe Biden look clear headed. Joe Biden is clearheaded about this. These comments are, if he's not incoherent, then he's dangerously leading us into a world war. It's just astonishing that there's even a comparison between the two and that equalization of this. And the fact that the New York Times did not put this on the very top of the thing and kept referring to Joe Biden's that stupid report was, I think, a dereliction of their duty.

25:55I never say that about the media. But in this case, when I heard that out of his mouth, I was like, are you kidding me what he just said? Dangerous. And if he meant it, he's dangerous. And if he's incoherent, he's even worse, more dangerous. Your thoughts? Well, someone called me over the weekend and said, you know, if you were us, the Democrats, how would you deal with this issue? And I said, you're getting one thing right, but you're forgetting the second. You know, you got the peanut butter right, but you're missing the chocolate. Him taking it is humorous. Humor reflects intellect and it makes light of the issue and you kind of turn the situation around.

26:34And they're doing a great job of having Biden joke about it. where they're failing is that it should be the following. That is, no one person runs the largest country in the world. It's never been one person. It's an entire infrastructure. It's a person running a company. This is the most robust, youthful, vigorous administration in history. We have, for the first time, a young woman as vice president. We have a secretary of transportation who is just into his 40s. We have secretaries of state who are young and vigorous, not old men from Exxon. And by the way, young, vigorous people who work really hard, you're loyal to them and you create a culture of youth and loyalty and innovation.

27:21And that's what they have in the White House versus this revolving door of old white men, including fucking Peter Navarro, who's going to prison. I mean, if you want to talk about an administration, you don't talk about the president, you talk about the presidency. And this is a group of people who are the most youthful, robust, and innovative in history. And that's how they should position it. Yeah, he's old. There's nothing they can do about it. But look at who he surrounds himself with. Although Republicans use that as they're all really running it in his place, that he's just weekend at Bernie's.

27:49So I was on a panel, I think it was Brett Seasen, called Weekend at Bernie's. Fuck you on that one. I got to say, I couldn't say that on the air, but he's not weekend at Yeah, that's right. Whereas Trump just kept firing them and then they kept turning on the guy and either running against him or ending up in jail. That's not youthful. That's about as primitive as you can get. And if you have to look at, and we're not usually this thing, but you have to look at the people who've worked for him. Every person who's worked for him who's left calls him a moron, crazy, incoherent, possibly insane. You know, all this stuff.

28:22I'm sorry. It's just not the same with Joe Biden. And the equalization of it cannot be allowed to happen. And I absolutely get why people do it, because most people have the kind of old guy, most people know the old guy Joe Biden is. They're not used to crazy, like really malevolently crazy old people. There's only a few of those, right, comparatively. And so that's what they're worried about. What they should be worried about is a highly incoherent person who's becoming increasingly incoherent, is overweight, is clearly been red-pilled in a way that's really disturbing. And even just attacking Nikki Haley's husband, where's her husband?

29:00Where's her husband? He's deployed in the military. He's fighting overseas. You fucker. Like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you. Like that kind of thing. And as someone whose dad was in the military, it's astonishing. And he did it before. He did it with the Gold Star fan. He did it with John McCain. Oh, come on. I don't like people who've been captured. But here's the problem. There's no such thing as shaming people into not voting for the guy. No, there isn't. They've got to focus. They've got to play offense. And I think they should absolutely highlight and get some of that youth out there. Because the way I would position it is the president is old.

29:35There's no getting around it. He still has his faculties. He makes great decisions. You want to don't measure behaviors. Don't measure gaffes. Measure results. The results here are the best in history. Jobs, low unemployment, they're the best in history. His age is an issue. He has the most youthful presidency in the history of the country. Good. I like that. Scott, they should hire you. Decide what team you want. One of the things, they should also like vitamin this man up and get him out there. They got to like, you know, there's ways to make people cognitively like sharper and just let him sleep, get him out there.

30:10You know, everyone who has gets, you and I both know it. We get, when we get tired, we start to make mistakes, right? So, and we're not that old, but it happens. So anyway, we have to go on a quick break. I think they should hire you, Scott. When we come back, we'll discuss Disney's new adventure with Epic Games, a big deal. and we'll chat with friends of Pivot, Zoe Schiffer and Kurt Wagner about Elon Musk's chaotic reign at Twitter.

30:56Backed by authenticity guarantee. eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion. eBay. Things people love. Imagine fast hydration. Combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching. It's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes, so you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free hydrating energy. Tap the banner to learn more. Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs, but luckily there's a simple answer to them.

31:40Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

32:07Scott, we're back. Disney has turned the corner and entered a new era, according to CEO Bob Iger, following a blockbuster first-quarter earnings report. Earnings per share rose 23%, beating estimates. The company cut streaming losses more than expected to$138 million. Pretty good. Manageable. and also says it will boost its cash dividend by 50%. Disney also made a slew of other announcements, including an ESPN streaming service in 2025, an exclusive version of Taylor Swift's era tour movie that will stream on Disney Plus, Smart Move, and a Moana sequel. Also, Frozen is coming. I got that directly from Bob Iger, which of course he wants me to spend more on Frozen.

32:41And perhaps the biggest news of all, Disney is getting into gaming, acquiring a$1.5 billion stake in Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite. Scott, you had talked about Disney being a buy, one of your buys. Talk about the move into gaming. You predicted this in various forms over the last few years. You thought Disney should acquire Roblox or Netflix would buy Epic. I think he's doing, you know, he has Nelson Pell's proxy fight looming. I think he's doing his Bob Iger thing. So what do you think about this? Yeah, I pick two or three stocks every year. My picks this year were Alphabet. I think this year is The Empire Strikes Back in terms of generative AI.

33:16I just think the data set they have to work with, your calendar, your YouTube viewership are just unparalleled. And I picked Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery because I think the tech stuff that everyone loves is so fully valued in my view. I wanted to go after stuff that's distressed. And Disney's trading at a 10-year low and it has unparalleled IP. I think Bob is a very solid executive. What they lost was the narrative. And it wasn't entirely sure what the strategy was. And I think he's sort of turned it around and appears to be playing offense after the layoffs. Streaming's now making money.

33:51The parks are just this unsung juggernaut of a business. I think they did$10 billion in EBITDA this year. and so epic just disclosure epic is one of my biggest investments in 2021 i made a purchase in the private markets you know there's all these platforms now that sell shares secondary secondary shares are from employees and i did for a couple reasons one i wanted some exposure to what is a 180 billion dollar market the gaming industry epic has fortnite which i see is just an unbelievable my 13 year old is i want to say addicted but the reason i like video games more than social media is there are actual social i just one of the nicest moments of my week is my son has this battle cry that he screams out from the room when he's playing fortnight with his buddies and they're really elegant in terms of how they monetize it they also have sort of this underlying infrastructure so i thought i want some exposure to the space now it's it it adds to the flywheel at Disney, because you can imagine they're probably going to come up with all sorts of rides, maybe even, you know, I got to think there's going to be a Fortnite movie series in the makings.

35:02So this is, and this also gives them - Yeah, they probably watch Barbie very carefully, right? They probably watch Barbie. 100%. And this gives them a chance to date maybe before they acquire the company. What was interesting is the valuation on it was about$21 or$22 billion, which was actually lower than the valuation was last year. But the moment Disney made the investment, it began trading up in the secondary market because everybody sees, you know, the validation of having Disney involved. I think this is good for Epic. I think it's good for Disney. I think it's good for Bob Iger. You know, win, win, win.

35:29Yeah, let me put some context in here. Disney has been in gaming. They tried Club Penguin, mostly for kids. They bought a bunch. I'm blanking on all the... Tapulous. They had a lot of app stuff and it didn't work out well for them. Maker Studio. Remember that one? Maker. Yeah. Oh, yeah, sure. That was a more video oriented. It wasn't gaming. But they were in a lot of gaming stuff, especially around kids. My kids had Club Penguin. And I write about it a little bit in my upcoming book, but they never were able to make it work because they never really they bought these companies, but they weren't committed to gaming.

35:58This is a very important gaming company. You know, this is what it does is it puts them at odds with Apple, which is in a, you know, in a very serious legal fight over App Store stuff with Epic. And the CEO is particular. I'm going to hopefully interview him soon. but it puts them at odds with Apple, which is one of their partner, right? Who's been, Iger and Apple have been very close, but they have to get into, it's sort of like, you know, whatever you think of the Vision Pro, Apple has to get into facial computing or facial computing really. And they have to get into gaming. This is a critical part.

36:36Netflix has kind of dabbled in it by creating a gaming thing, but Disney's got to own this area in a really significant way. And this is what they do. Now, especially because the Nelson Peltz proxy fight is still looming, Iger addressed it in an interview with CNBC last week following the earnings report. Let's listen. The last thing that we need right now is to be distracted in terms of our time, our energy by an activist or activists that, frankly, have a completely different agenda and don't understand our company, its assets, even the essence of the Disney brand. No, that's him. He's pushing back and he has been.

37:11And for his part, Peltz responded to Disney's latest earnings saying it's deja vu all over again. We saw the movie last year and didn't like the ending. Nelson, you got to go away. Stop hanging out with Elon Musk, etc. I think he's going to fend off Peltz. Peltz is looking kind of, he's kind of ruining his brand here. He's doing things that are right for this company. And to sort of badmouth it when he's doing the streaming got better. This is a really interesting deal. The parks are doing well. I mean, this is a difficult turnaround for Bob Iger, some of which is his own fault, right? No question.

37:43But he was right about going into streaming, even though it is costly. So I think Peltz looks like a POTS. Yeah, but the ultimate shark repellent for an activist is when the stock goes up. The stock's up 22 % in the last 30 days. And so what happens is if the stock goes up, this is what happens. When you're an activist investor, which I've done, you never win at the first meeting, at the first annual meeting. But if the stock continues to go down, you win at the second. If the stock continues to go up, as the activist, you just sell your stake. You're in it for money. You're not in it for victories or wins.

38:15I mean, these guys have big egos, but for the most part, they're in it to make money. So if this stock does what I think it's going to do, and I think it's up 50 % to 100 % in 12 months, Helz will declare victory and leave, never run another proxy fight, make a shit ton of money, and Bob will not have this guy on his board. I disagree. I've been in a ton of these situations. Bob has a bunch of people on the board who are not scared of Nelson Peltz. They would have stuck the angry guy in the corner and let him punch himself out and gotten on with the board meeting. And then they wouldn't have had this detractor heckling from the cheap seats.

38:48If the stock continues to go up, Nelson Peltz will sell and go away and everyone wins. Right. Yep. That's it. He's not winning on this one. Anyway, we'll see what happens. Iger did a great job with this. I think Epic is really interesting and really sharp move by him. And it's not that risky, but it's also not unrisky, which is just the way you want to be. All right, let's bring in our friends of Pivot.

39:14Zoe Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer and the author of Extremely Hardcore Inside Elon Musk's Twitter. Kurt Wagner covers social media for Bloomberg and is the author of Battle for the Bird, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the$44 billion fight for Twitter's soul. Twitter books are here, everybody. um welcome but two people i have great regard for kurt used to work for me a long time ago um and zoe works for casey newt who's a very good friend of mine both amazing reporters welcome to both of you thank you thanks for having us thank you so much for having us so let's start you both have twitter books you're competing we decided to bring you together i'm sorry to do this but it's better for you it's better because we're going to talk about both your books and um and and they're different in different in lots of ways and we want to distinguish them and why you should read both Anyway, Kurt, you detail in your book how Twitter was already having problems during the Jack Dorsey years, well before Elon came onto the scene.

40:05He obviously was at the Super Bowl last night sitting there looking forlorn, as always. Let's talk about the history. You covered this for us at Recode for many years. Some news from the weekend. A federal judge ordered Elon to testify again in the SEC's probe of his purchase of Twitter. The SEC is examining whether Elon followed a law when filing the paperwork about his purchases of Twitter stock and whether his statements about the deal were accurate. But let's start with you because the Jack Dorsey years, because he kind of pushed this and thought it would be great for Twitter. So talk a little bit about that.

40:35He did. I mean, he admired Elon tremendously. He used to refer to him as his favorite tweeter. He invited him to corporate offsites. Yeah, yeah. He really had kind of an admiration for Elon. And so when this opportunity presented itself, I think Jack was super excited about it. You know, he'd been talking and Kara, you've heard this before as well, but he'd been talking for years about how Twitter shouldn't be a public company. Like Jack was very much of this mindset that Twitter should be private, that it should be out of, you know, the pressures of the Wall Street investor cooker. And so when Elon showed up and had the money to do this thing that Jack had wanted to have done for a long time, he jumped at it.

41:14Obviously, I think it was a mistake, but that's one of the reasons that he was so excited for Elon to take over. Well, talk a little bit about the problems there. We covered this for years, both of us. It was a, you know, as Mark Duckworth said, a clown car that ran into a gold mine. And it was always a clown car and a very emotional one. It was a company that had tremendous influence that outweighed its business by, you know, an order of magnitude, right? And so people talked about it, people used it and used it for politics and sports and other cultural things, but the business never caught up.

41:49And that was why it was always in this really tough position. And one of the things that my book gets into is actually, you know, Jack Dorsey had orchestrated this three-year business plan right before Elon showed up. And it was very ambitious. It was coming off the heels of COVID. They were like, hey, we're going to, you know, add more users than we've ever added. We're going to build more revenue than we've ever had. And they were not on pace to hit any of these things. No, they never were. Yeah, you look into the future and you just realize they're kind of headed for this disaster financially as a publicly traded company.

42:19So again, I think the board also saw Elon as an escape from having to go through what they knew was going to be a bad situation. And no one else wanted to buy it. Zoe, is there a scenario where Elon could have been successful at the helm of Twitter? Let's get, so he buys it. He tries not to buy it. I guess he just, he decided to say, I'll buy it no matter what. And then of course, tried to backtrack on it. you write the attributes that made Musk good at tweeting a combination of recklessness and shamelessness. I think you're being kind, but you're right on those things made him exceedingly bad at running Twitter.

42:47Talk about that transition because I even thought he would be good. I was like, OK, let's try this because it was such a it was such a disaster as a company. Yeah, I think there's this narrative now that the media was very biased against Elon's acquisition from the beginning, and that's actually incorrect. There was a lot of excitement, even from a small group of employees and people in the media about the acquisition, because like Kurt said, Twitter had been in such a bad place kind of financially and growth wise for so long. There was a lot of frustration from even certain employees about this.

43:19What Elon did and what I feel like was such a big unforced error is that he came in with this posture of everyone who works here is an idiot and I don't want to listen to you. He didn't come in with an immense amount of curiosity. When he sat down with employees from day one and they were explaining the technical backend of how Twitter worked, he would interrupt them and kind of talk about his own expertise, or he would look really bored or be scrolling on his phone. So from day one, he wasn't really interested in what the people who had worked there and had worked so hard to make Twitter successful had to say.

43:53And why was that from your perspective? I think that he felt like Twitter had been sliding in a bad direction. And he really conflated some of the attributes of Twitter's company culture with this big fear he had around the woke mind virus, the idea that employees got a day of rest off every month, that they got pretty good perks. It was, in his mind, a culture of laziness of people who didn't want to work hard, who didn't want to be hardcore. And he felt like if I can put rockets into space, if I can build electric vehicles, then surely I'll be able to come in and fix Twitter no problem. Because it's a media company.

44:31Scott? If I can only read one of your books, which should I read? Just kidding. Oh, stop it. But go ahead. You won't read mine either. Don't worry, guys. He's not going to read my book either. But go ahead. Isn't Twitter the ultimate side piece? You know, you have a guy who is making tens of billions of dollars at a payments company, kind of showing up every once in a while and just nodding. and then you have a guy making tens of millions somewhere else showing up every once in a while to tell them how fucking stupid they are and they get back to other shit. And now you have a CEO who's literally in overhead, who has no business running a company like this.

45:08Isn't this arguably, I'm having a difficult time thinking of any company that's had three worst CEOs. I think that the fact that there's been so much turnover at the CEO, I think this is one of the worst CEO jobs around because it sounds really glamorous, right? It's Twitter. You get to like show up at the Super Bowl. You get to, you know, do all these things. You're culturally relevant, which is really exciting to a lot of people. But again, the business was always a bit of a disaster. It comes with all these huge problems around content moderation that people, you know, think are going to be super easy to solve and they're never as black and white as they seem.

45:44And there's a reason like Dick Costolo, he had a great quote. Actually, he shared this with Cara during an interview. He said, running Twitter is like running any other company in dog years. It's like one year at Twitter is seven years somewhere else. It's because it's a really thankless, terrible job. But people think it's going to be cool because it's Twitter and there's a cultural element to it. And I think that that bothers people. Yeah. I mean, this isn't as true at the CEO level, but it was true for a lot of the board members and the management. One of the key frustrations that employees had is that so few people at the highest levels of the company even tweeted.

46:16They didn't use the product. And a lot of employees joined because they loved Twitter as a product. And then they were there and it felt like there was an immense lack of understanding of what Twitter even was and what made it special. So many of the features that we think of as critical and crucial to how Twitter works actually came from the community. It was things that users found to organize the conversation and literally begged Twitter for years to codify into the feature set. And then Twitter would kind of begrudgingly do it. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of that thing about a kid. When it was good.

46:47It was very, very good. And when it was bad, it was awful, you know, in terms of, but it was always an awful business. I think it just has morphed into an awful place in a lot of ways. Although last night with the Super Bowl, it was fun, right? For a second again. But both of you talked to a number of former employees for these books. Was something you found particularly shocking or surprising? Zoe, you start and then Kurt. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that we know, but I kind of overlooked at the beginning was just, there was this, it was a small group, But there was kind of a core group of employees who were really frustrated with Twitter 1.0.

47:20They felt like it was incredibly inefficient. They wanted to hustle and get stuff done and ship new features. And they just felt like there were so many roadblocks in Twitter prior to Elon Musk coming on board. And so when they saw Elon coming in, talking about efficiency, shipping product really fast, they were actually really, really excited. And yet even those people who were so loyal and all in on Twitter 2.0, all in on this hardcore vision, became incredibly disillusioned over the months that followed. Why? Because they felt like his product sense, the kind of core thing that they thought he was going to bring, you know, maybe culturally he won't be that great.

47:54Maybe he'll be kind of rude in person, but like his product sense will be really, really good. That just didn't feel like it was in place. He would kind of come up with ideas on a whim. It felt like his mentions were dictating what employees were working on. If a high profile person was in his mentions complaining about something, all of a sudden it would be Code Red, the top engineering project of the day. And they were being torn in a lot of directions at once. It was like, fix this content moderation problem immediately right now. Elon's really upset about it. But also, we need to ship this other thing right now.

48:23It needs to be done by the following morning or everyone's fired. And no amount of loyalty would ensure that people would keep their jobs. So Kurt, talk about that. That's behaving like a king, right? Which he behaves everywhere else if you start to really plumb at his other companies. And one of the things that I'm sure Zoe saw and I saw as well is that a lot of his product decisions and a lot of his direction came from his own personal experience, right? He's basically running this thing in a way that fits for him, but he is not the average user. He's not even close to the average user, right?

48:54He's got 160 million followers and he's the richest man in the world. So he's kind of, you know, creating a public good or a public service as he wants to sort of think of it as, but he's doing it in a way that suits his own personality, which is not a very useful way for the rest of us. What about the increasing radicalization of him? He's really changed as anyone who's spent any time with him. Talk a little bit about that. I mean, there's a couple of theories around this. I think one of mine is simply that this was a really easy way to differentiate what he's doing at X versus what Twitter was, right?

49:30I mean, it was clear that Twitter wasn't working, right? Even Jack Dorsey didn't think Twitter was working. And so one thing you can do if you're the new guy is to come in and just be the exact opposite of what the old guy was doing. And so part of me wonders how much of this shift to the right, this shift to very conservative, anti-woke mindset of Elon is really a business decision in some ways. It's a way to differentiate himself and what X is building and bring in people who were disillusioned by the old version of Twitter. Oh, I think it's very real. Zoe? Well, I'm curious what you think about this, because I also, I agree with everything Kurt's saying.

50:08And I also feel like the Elon Musk that's building Twitter or X is a very different Elon Musk from the one that was building Tesla. And I think one difference is that he has a lot fewer people around him who will tell him the truth. It feels like his circle has gotten smaller and it's got more sycophantic. It's like the people that are close to him are total yes men. And when he's retelling a joke for the third time, no one's going to tell him that he's doing that when he's making a horrible decision or going after someone and harassing them. No one really stands up. And if they do, it's a lower level employee who's instantly out the door.

50:38But you know him, you knew him much better than us in the earlier days. Yeah, I think I think I would point to the two Wall Street Journal articles recently about drug issues. And then the board, the enabling board, and Scott maybe has a question about this, but the board was highly enabling and because they made money. And I thought that was the most important thing to point out is everyone who's enabling him and licking him up and down all day either wants to be on the plane or wants to, I don't know why you would, sounds, you know, I'd rather be with Taylor Swift, but if I was going to suck up to someone, but, but he, you know, he, the enablers are really quite something and they literally can't.

51:12And I've had some of them come up to me saying, we can't say anything, keep saying it publicly because we can't. And I'm like, fuck you. That's what I, you know what I mean? I was like, yes, you can, but you have, you're in love with your hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't think, how much money do you need? I'm curious what you know about the business where it stands today. I just can't imagine any advertiser would think, oh, we should advertise on Twitter. What do the financials look like? And do you have any insight into whether these three banks that hold the debt are going to try and offload the debt?

51:43What are the atmospherics around the current business? I can go first. Sure. I read a little bit about this and I'm interested if Zoe's heard similar or not, but that in the Q4, so the holiday quarter, which is obviously a huge one for advertisers, that their target was around$2.5 billion in advertising revenue. Now, that's a little more than half of what they did two years earlier, the last full year before Elon was there. And this was also before Elon told advertisers to go fuck yourself on stage at Dealbook. So I would be shocked if they hit that, quite frankly. And I was having conversations with advertisers about the past month, both after CES, but before the Super Bowl to just get a feel for what they were thinking.

52:23And almost all of them said the same thing, which is like, our clients don't feel comfortable coming back because Elon is so unpredictable. It's not even necessarily the stuff that's happening on the platform. It's Elon himself. And it was very telling yesterday, the Super Bowl, biggest ad day of the year for X. Elon was tweeting about boobs. I don't know if you guys saw this. He was like, literally posting the morning of the Super Bowl when all these advertisers, they've been luring them back, trying to convince him this is a safe place. And he's coming and he's posting these things that are just head scratchers.

52:54And until he stops doing that, I don't think advertisers are going to be super comfortable. He's not going to stop doing that. And let me underscore he's 52. But go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I've heard the same thing as Kurt. It's not a surprise. He said one year after he bought the company that it was worth$19 billion. He bought it for$44 billion. He said himself he didn't buy Twitter to make money and that he would rather be able to say what he wants to say when he wants to say it, consequences be damned. And I think he keeps doing those exact things. He's had this tortured relationship with advertisers from day one because why?

53:27Advertisers are content moderators. They're going to pull ad dollars if you talk about Boopster in the Super Bowl. And yet he seems to not be able to help himself. And if that's because of, like Kara pointed to, the drug use that's been documented very well by the Wall Street Journal, or simply because he has a very childish sense of humor. We don't know, but he has very few checks and balances on his power and he seems to not care if it hurts the business. So where does CEO Linda Iaccarino, and I'm using CEO term loosely, fit into all of this, if at all? I guess I'll give her credit for this.

53:59I mean, the Super Bowl actually brought some real advertisers back to X. I was actually sort of surprised. And, you know, that's only going to happen if someone is there to convince them. She's very good at them, right? Yeah, she's in that world. She's from that world. People, before she took this job, I believe people like really respected her and, you know, admired her in that industry. And so clearly she is doing what she can to like build on those relationships and bring people back. But she has a boss who is constantly working against her, which is not easy. And, you know, I don't think you should necessarily let her off the hook here either, right?

54:36I mean, she's choosing to be there. She's choosing to, you know, know, kind of support Elon and the things that he is saying sometimes. But I think they're working almost against each other often because she's out trying to sell this stuff and he's just, you know, lighted in on fire at the same time. Let me say, I know a lot of people closer. She's all in. She's blaming everybody else, including me. That's what I was going to say. Everything we know so far is that she's completely all in on the vision still and she is doing what she was hired to do, which is clean up Elon Musk's messes. Well, she also thinks he's the greatest mind in all of history from what I understand.

55:07But okay, sure. Yeah, why not? I'd go with Einstein, perhaps. There's been so many rumors of so many different businesses, payments, right? The X, the Everything app. Do you have any sense for what is actually going to happen in terms of their product roadmap in 24? I mean, we know that they're working on a complete app redesign and revamp and payments are going to be a really big part of that. But I have such suspicion about the everything app terminology, even when he first bought the company, he hosted an all hands meeting with employees. And someone asked very specifically, are you going to try and make us like WeChat?

55:40And he scoffed. He was like, that's a ridiculous question. I just use it as an example. Everything app can mean a lot of different things. Since then, we've heard him talk about literally making X a lot like WeChat. This isn't a vision that feels like it comes from a serious strategy. It feels like something that happens on a whim. Take just one example, which is Elon Musk's decision to limit API access for third-party developers. If you are truly building a super app, you want third-party developers building apps on top of your app. Because with 1 ,500, 1 ,000 engineers, you're not going to be able to build all of the functionality that you need in order to create a really robust super app.

56:18And yet we see him saying things and then doing the exact opposite in practice. Well, if I could add to that too, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do this at Meta or back at Facebook, right? With Messenger, they're kind of trying to do it a little bit with WhatsApp and it didn't work. And Messenger is way bigger than Twitter was. I'd say Mark Zuckerberg is probably a much better executor of these kind of like software, consumer software ideas than Elon is. And I just don't think that this idea of a super app is super relevant to, you know, folks in the United States, quite frankly, like it has some appeal in Asia.

56:53But yeah, I just I'm with Zoe. He has been fixated on for years. He has. He talked about it a long time ago. Yeah. No, no. But it's just like, I'm interested in world peace. It doesn't mean it's going to happen like kind of thing. It's just not clear to me what that even means to him. So what is the what is what's the thing they're going to do? What's the revenue? As Scott just asked, what is is there anything they could do? Give me an idea. Each of you. I mean, I think payments are the big push, but I would be curious, like, what, Kurt, I think that that's the kind of X.com vision from the 90s is integrating a payment platform with social.

57:25Not media companies, not Tucker Carlson Network, right? Yeah, I'm not going to say this is going to work, but because this is where they're headed, I'll point it out. They're going into this professionally produced video route that we actually saw with the Twitter 1.0 guys. Yeah. And, you know, the idea being, hey, if we have WWE wrestling and we have Don Lemon and we have Tucker Carlson and, you know, God willing, we're going to partner with the NFL. That's never going to happen. But let's pretend, right? Maybe, maybe, maybe they could get some high quality video advertisers to come back because they know they're advertising against the NFL or the WWE.

58:02They're not advertising against random people in your feed. We saw this play out with Twitter 1.0. It did not work. I'm not necessarily convinced it's going to work here. But since that's the direction they're going, I'll say that that might be what we're going to see over the next year. You young people don't remember when Yahoo did news. Everyone wore Banana Republic outfits. It didn't work. I feel like that's kind of their vision of what's going to happen. If you were going to ask me what I think is actually going to happen, I think XAI subsumes X. I think the focus becomes large language models and X becomes an input for those models, a training ground for those models.

58:37But the focus and the momentum shifts. But what's the consumer facing product there? I mean, a chat GPT rival. Oh, I see. Got it. I mean, X could still exist, right? Because you still want the training data for all that. And like X still exists. But I think what we're seeing with like Quora, where all of the new investment dollars are coming in, but they're coming in to fund the AI initiatives. They're not going to revamp Quora and make Quora better. Like that, to me, is the corollary here. This is a prediction. This is just what I think. But what is the most surprising thing that you found, the single most surprising in a very short order?

59:08And will Elon own this thing going forward five years? I say yes. I don't know about the surprising things. I didn't do the whole book on it. But each of you tell me that. Yeah, I can go first. This is a little tiny detail. but again, one I found surprising, which is right around the time that Elon started buying Twitter stock, which was late January of 2022. He had complained to CEO Parag Agarwal about the at Elon Jet account and basically said, you need to take this off Twitter. It's following my plane. It's a privacy thing. And Parag essentially ignored Elon. And within days, weeks, he's buying Twitter shares.

59:49And two months later, he owns the whole company. Now, I'm not saying that's exactly the motivation, but I think the timing is super interesting. And I can also say that some people pretty deeply involved in the deal thought that that was a true motivation for him. And it's just crazy to think that this$44 billion deal may have started with Elon Jet account. And I don't think it's that crazy. I would say Babylon Day really bugged him. He complained about it to me, actually. Go ahead. Oh, and I do think Elon will hold Twitter only because I think to get rid of it would be to admit failure and defeat.

1:00:18And I'm not sure that he'd be willing to do it. And as Zoe pointed out the XAI thing gives him a very logical pivot into the AI wars. And I think Twitter could be key to that. So I think he's going to hold on to it. Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of small, surprising revelations. But one that comes to mind immediately is just the afternoon of deal close when there's been this enormous push and pull over the summer. Will he buy the company? Will he not? He's going to sue Twitter. Twitter is going to sue him back. They're all ready to close the deal. All the paperwork is being signed. All of the lawyers are at the office and Elon realizes that he's missing about$500 million and they're short.

1:00:54And he asks Twitter if they can loan him the money, essentially, because it's about to be theirs. Twitter says, absolutely not. And they're able to get it anyway. But I think it just shows how slapdash the entire process was that even at the 11th hour, they were scrambling trying to get the funding. I agree with everything that you both said. And I think too much of his ego is wrapped up in X to have someone else own and run the company. What is the culture of the vibe like at Twitter right now? It's a totally different company from the one that it used to be in every way. Like the office literally looks different.

1:01:30It used to have this kind of like celebratory, multicultural vibe. And now it's like more of a spaceship metal kind of, the art on the walls looks really different. But I think the people who are there, it's very, very top down now. And the people who are there are either They're completely bought into Elon Musk's vision or they're trapped for visa reasons. But either way, they're pretty scared to talk and there's not a vibe of like open discussion at all anymore. Yeah, I was going to say just the commitment to Elon is pretty intense for the people who are still there. And like we're at the point where most people who who didn't believe or whatever that they've been able to jump ship, not all, but most.

1:02:12And so it's just, yeah, it's much more hardcore Elon than it was before, to give Zoe's book a shout out there. Yeah, excellent. All right. Thank you, Zoe and Kurt. I recommend both books, Scott. Again, Zoe's book is called Extremely Hardcore Inside Elon Musk's Twitter. And Kurt's book is Battle for the Bird, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the$44 billion fight for Twitter's soul. I would say the soul is lost, but I really appreciate that from both of you. Thank you, Cara. Thanks, Scott. Thanks so much for having us. And we're excited for your book as well. Yeah. Snooze. Oh, stop it. You're not reading any of them, Scott.

1:02:50So just move along. Anyway, thank you guys so much. All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for Wins and Fails.

1:03:00There is a lot to talk about when we talk about Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel. One big question I've got is why in 2025 are late night TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show still on TV? Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks. If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes. But what are you even anymore? What even is your brand anymore? I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, and that was James Ponowozik, the TV critic for The New York Times. This week, we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now.

1:03:49That's This Week on Channels, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

1:04:00Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. Would you like to go first? Sure. No, you go first, Kara. I would say the win, I thought the Super Bowl was, again, like the Grammys, a real win for entertainment and real people. It was lovely. It had a lovely vibe to it. And I liked it a lot. And I don't love a sports event. And I would say, I got to say, a win goes to Joe Biden's social media manager. I was really impressed. I thought it was very funny and tongue-in-cheek. And I think they're doing a fantastic job. I don't think it's going to get through to as many people, but I'm glad they're on TikTok.

1:04:33talk, the Communist Party and all. My fail was Donald, as I said earlier, Donald Trump with NATO. I get there's issues around NATO. Hello. Nice to meet you. So democracy is tough. But what he has said is dangerous. It's dangerous, especially the signals it's given to someone like Putin. My only non-worry about that is Putin's incompetent. And as you see, he can't even win in Ukraine. He's a world power. So that would be the only thing. But To put so many people in harm's way like this is he should not be president of the United States. I get why people want to vote for him. I'm not trying to shame you.

1:05:10But to wish for the economy to go down was heinous enough. This is really, really, really dangerous. Everyone's world will be crushed economically if something like this happens. It's an invitation to dictatorship. And it's an invitation to dictators. Well, can you imagine how Finland feels? Finland, one of the big victories of NATO, the European Union, and the brave Ukrainians and Biden and the EU's coming together around pushing back on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is Finland decided to join NATO. How the fuck do they feel right now? Yeah. They're taking their young men and women and putting them in a NATO uniform.

1:05:52And you're saying that the primary funder and let's be honest, NATO's for the most part controlled by the US. They're now saying, we're now saying to Finland who shares an 800 mile border with Russia, the guy that might be president is saying that Putin should attack NATO. I mean, anyway. And that's what he said. Don't say he suggested it. He said it. He's a transactional fuck is what he is. He thinks everything's a real estate deal. And he isn't really that good at real estate either. So please, it's not real estate. This is not real estate. These aren't condos in Queens. It's not. This guy's wholly unqualified to be the commander in chief, wholly and dangerous.

1:06:33Okay. So my win is I can't help it. I've said young people, you shouldn't buy, try and find the needle in the haystack. You should buy the haystack, buy low cost ETFs and index funds. But I love stock picking. I think it's fun. I think you and try and find outsized alpha and gains in individual stocks. You learn a lot about the markets if you're so inclined, and most people aren't, but if you are. But one of my holdings, and I'm talking my own book here, and it's confirmation bias, but I think there's some logic here. I think Airbnb is more of a prediction than a win, is going to have a monster earnings at the close of business today.

1:07:07We release on a Tuesday. I'm still just in absolute awe of Meta's earnings. And I'm not in awe of the company. I think Mark Zuckerberg, to have all that kind of money and not protect people means he's a boy whose masculinity never took over and his intelligence and his skills have vastly outpaced his empathy and masculinity. I think he's a lost man. But the earnings were so striking to grow revenues 25 % and while reducing headcount 25%. I've never seen anything like that. And I tried to suss out what are the things that really drove it. And it was one, I looked at, I compiled who are the biggest purchasers or who has the most NVIDIA AI-enabled GPUs on order.

1:07:56And the two biggest are Microsoft and Meta. They have the most on order. And I don't think there's any accident that Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world and Meta just absolutely blew away its numbers. And I was talking to the team today. I believe that these GPUs are basically that this moved AI is the equivalent of corporate Ozempic and that it's giving them such incredible efficiency, they can shed weight like they've never before. And I was thinking about Airbnb. They also, what else is meta? Meta is in a consumer space. Consumer spending is much more robust than people think.

1:08:33It's the biggest player in the space. We're moving to an economy. I'd ask Swatomotor and on Prop G the other day. and he's like, it's not necessarily a good thing, but size matters and it keeps increasingly matter. And the biggest company in every category is garnering more and more efficiency and more and more market share. Consumer spending vastly outpaced any estimates. And then I think about Airbnb. They bought an AI company in Q3 of last year. It wasn't a big purchase, but it reflects that Brian is really thinking about AI. They have not been hiring like crazy. Unfortunately, there's some unfortunate winds to their back in that is, I think young people have sort of, I don't want to say given up on buying a house, but are taking a lot of that money.

1:09:11And there's just a different gestalt, zeitgeist among young people. If you're in a relationship with someone, you might think, I'm going to go to Bangkok for three months and work remotely. And that just feeds right into now 20%, I believe, of Airbnb's bookings are for 30 days or longer. Consumer spending is way up. I think they've embraced AI. I think you're looking at, they're the leader in their space. I don't think it's just young people. You know, we're renovating a house. I would look, first, before looking for something, I went to Airbnb. And not only that, anyone who's actually looked at the pricing of Airbnb, I hate to say this, Airbnb has monopoly power.

1:09:46And look at the fees they charge. Oh, there's VRBO. Yeah, there's VRBO. They're pretty good. VRBO to Airbnb is what Lyft is to Uber. And that is, it's kind of cute. In certain areas, they're good, especially with older people and older. Anyway, yeah, yes, I like them both. I like them both. Anyways, I just think, and this is a prediction, and granted, a disclosure, I want to start, but I think you're going to see a monster earnings call tonight from Airbnb that's going to surprise everyone to the upside. And quite frankly, the market already senses it. Stock's up 7 % today. My fail is I was really moved and shocked by, I mean, not shocked, shocked but not surprised.

1:10:19Someone put out this Instagram reel with Julia Roberts talking about this picture with her niece. Did you see this? Yeah, she looked adorable. Emma Roberts. It was just so cute. She's with her niece, cute thing, playing cards in the morning. They look adorable. Yeah. And there are literally hundreds of comments about how she's not aging well, and look how shitty she looks, talking about what's failed surgery, just really going after her looks. And I thought to myself, okay, if one of the most beautiful women in history gets attacked like this, what are the chances that our daughters get to their 30s on stage?

1:10:57And she made this point. Yeah, and I really appreciate her saying that. Yeah, she made a very big point of it. Good for her. She came out swinging. She said, this is just such bullshit. And I thought, and here's the thing, fairly or unfairly, the reality is women are disproportionately evaluated based on their appearance and men are disproportionately evaluated based on their economic well-being, economic prosperity. You would never say to a man, you are so weak and such a failure and have so few skills, you will not be able to take care of your kids. You would never say that to a man. You would never go on social media and say, I've observed you and you will never be able to take care of your children.

1:11:41You would think that is a low blow. You would never say that. But it's open season on women's looks. I agree. I liked what she had to say. She was clear-headed in doing it. I have to say, dunkery has really got—I've about had it with dunking. Like, I don't mind if it's at, like, big famous people. And some of it's funny. I like it when it's funny and not so righteous. But the righteousness and the ability just to say nasty shit out loud is really—it's a disease of Trump. It's a disease of Trump. I'm a sexist. I make fun of men's looks. I objectify them. With women, you don't make fun of their looks.

1:12:17Yeah. Oh, I agree. Great. I don't think you should make fun of anyone's looks, but yeah. Our society disproportionately evaluates women, and young women especially are told that their entire net worth, their self-esteem, unfortunately, should come from their looks. You would never walk into a restaurant and start and see someone famous and go, Jesus Christ, you're aging poorly. You would never say that. It's not a free speech issue. And the thing that was really unfortunate about it is a lot of these comments, you can tell, are from men. Yeah. And it's just like, Jesus Christ. Welcome to GamerGate.

1:12:45I agree. Did your mother teach you anything? So, and everyone goes to, well, it's free speech. It's great about the internet. You would never behave this way. You would never go on Twitter and say to a young man, you can't speak English. Your logic is so poor, you will never be able to take care of your children because you'll be such an economic failure. You would never say that. You wouldn't. Anyway, so my fail is social media has given mostly men license to really attack back. This is the opposite of masculinity. These guys think that they're being tough. You move to protection. And women are especially sensitive because our society disproportionately evaluates them based on their looks.

1:13:34And it's not right, but it is. No man should ever disparage a woman's looks, ever. My win goes to Julia Roberts for speaking out and clapping back. I thought it was a nice moment for her to say, you know what? Yeah. What are you thinking? What are you thinking? I would agree. It's bad raising. When someone comes at me with, oh, it's my free speech, I'm like, fine, but you're an asshole. Like, that's what you are. You're an asshole. That's simply what you are. Anyway, speaking of relationships and men and women together, Scott and I went on Esther Perel's podcast, Where Should We Begin for some couples counseling?

1:14:10Because we love each other so deeply. You'll be able to hear the entire session next week. And here's a little tease. Sometimes people present themselves as tough. Yeah. But for the purpose of covering, what often is a very tender, gentle. I think you're talking about me. I am actually tough, but I also can be tender. It's okay to be tough. I mean, we've met maybe three or four times that we have spoken together. I don't think of you as tough, but I do sometimes think you can be intimidating. Which Scott, who presents us stuff, doesn't intimidate me at all.

1:14:50God, literally our narcissism knows no bounds. I know it's true, but it was good. Anyway, that'll drop in the Pivot feed on Tuesday, February 20th. It's very enjoyable. That's what the world needs, more Scott and Kara. Anyway, we want to hear from you, by the way. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. Scott, that is the show. We'll be back on Friday for more. What an enjoyable show once again. I love our relationship. I love our relationship. Read us out. Today's show is produced by Larry Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin.

1:15:24Ernie Intertot, engineer this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Neil Severio. Nishak Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.