Elon Musk’s Trillion Dollar Pay Plan & Obesity Drug Pricing 11/7/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Elon Musk, trillionaire? To become a trillionaire because he's already got how much? A lot. More than he'll ever need. $400 billion? Yeah, he wants to be in charge. Tesla shareholders approving an historic pay package that would make the world's richest person even richer. These T's. I can't believe we've been talking T's like this. As long as he hits the car company's very lofty goals, Musk biographer Walter Isaacson isn't so quick to doubt this time around. It seems more than just a stretch goal. It seems a moonshot goal.

0:41But you and I and many others thought it was unlikely last time and he did it. And the Trump White House's plan to lower the cost of popular weight loss drugs for consumers. Dr. Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, lays out the prescription. Unfortunately, most Americans can't afford these drugs. They're$1 ,200,$1 ,300 a month. So in this deal, we are reducing the cost on average to about$250 a month. And if you're on Medicare, which I administer, you're going to pay$50 copay. Government will pick up the rest. All that today and much more like Warren Buffett's warning on AI.

1:19It's Friday, November 7th. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand, Andrew, bye. In three, two, one, Q, Andrew. Good morning and welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live at the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Andrew Ross Sorkin along with Joe Kernan. Becky is off on this Friday morning, but we've got a lot going on. You're saying to the downside. Oh, no, no, no, no. I don't like the term. They were seeing things trading to the downside. It's like, yeah, things are lower. You don't need eight words. So here we are. Dow Jones off by the way, 25 points. How many hours of TV did you do?

1:53yesterday, would you say, in addition to ours? Oh, goodness, a lot. You are just, what is someone like that called? You're just a multimedia sort of renaissance man just everywhere, right? Trying to be. Are you enjoying it or you want it to be over? This is all about the book. 1929. Do we have that ready to go at all times? 19. Do we have it ready to go? We should have it ready to go. We clearly don't have it ready to go. As we talk, I should have said something I did. So but I didn't see any of your other appearances. There'll be you'll see them over time because some of them were live, some of them on other channels.

2:36There's probably some of them perhaps were on other channels that I will never see. That's possible. I know you have you're glued to one channel. No, I'm not. Oh, yeah. This is troubling. It's not Thanksgiving yet. Thank God. U.S. airlines starting to cancel flights after the FAA ordered reductions because of air traffic controller strain, which obviously is tied to the shutdown. Controllers have been working without pay since the shutdown began on October 1st. And according to FlightAware, more than 800 U.S. flights have been canceled for today. That's already more than four times higher than the average on any given day.

3:15The FAA ordered 40 airports to reduce air traffic, including Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. The FAA saying that four percent of flights will be affected today, ramping up to 10 percent by next Friday. Hertz says it's seeing an uptick in car rental reservations. You can always drive if you have the time. I don't know. I was just because of you just now. I was checking to make sure that my flight was not canceled. I'm headed to the great state of Texas. For more. This is the Texas book festival. This won't be broadcast. This is what this is. They probably these days, everything is broadcast.

3:55And it's because of. The book tour for your your new book, 1929. You're waiting for the graphic. There we go. Finally, let's talk about what's happening in the great state of Texas. Now that they finally got it. I know, but we've got a lot of news to get to. Well, this one, this was kind of a no. Tesla shareholders, in spite of Norway, whose GDP is about a third of the market cap of Tesla. But they didn't want this to happen. Let's just tell everybody what happened. Tesla shareholders did approve that pay package for the CEO, Elon Musk, that could eventually be worth a trillion dollars. He's got to meet a lot of targets to get there.

4:36The EV maker saying the plan got 75 percent support. We have a fantastic board, fantastic group of shareholders. Thank you all.

4:50And what we're about to embark upon is not merely a new chapter of the future of Tesla, but a whole new book. The pay package consists of 12 tranches of shares to be granted to Musk. That's if Tesla hits certain milestones of the next decade. Among those targets, growth in the company's earnings and market value. Tesla delivering a million of its yet-to-be-released Optimus robots. That's just one of the targets. Prediction market, Calci, up with a contract right now on when Musk will become a trillionaire. Musk making some other headlines in the meeting. But before we even get there, look at that for a second.

5:25So 55 % chance, more than a 50 % chance by 2030 that he is a trillionaire. More by 2029, more than a 50 % chance. But by the way, for that to happen, my understanding is he would have to capture, well, to become a trillionaire because he's already got how much? I don't know. A lot. More than whoever needs. $400 billion? Yeah, he wants to be in charge. Right, but the contracts for another trillion. This is not even suggesting that he gets all of it. This is suggesting I think he gets just probably a little bit more than half of it. Of course, they've got to get the market cap to over$8 billion for him to get.

6:05I'm sorry,$8 trillion with a T. Sorry, it's early in the morning and B's and T's. I can't believe we're even talking T's like this. You can't believe we're talking about T's on a day like this on the same week that New York City elected, basically, whatever you want to call him, a Democratic Socialist, a Communist, whatever you want to call him. He's 34 years old and he absolutely eviscerates anyone who's a billionaire. Anyone who's created all that wealth, who's created all those jobs, who's paid taxes and who's all the employees that they employ are paying taxes. All the shareholders that also were enriched as the market cap grows on most of the company, if they're founders.

6:51Not all of them are founders, obviously. Some of them inherit it. But the idea that billionaires are not a positive force, someone like Elon Musk for society, that's where we are right now in this zeitgeist of the moment. And I find it incredibly frustrating. I know you'll push back and give me the other side. But this is a 34 year old who's never had an actual job, probably hasn't contributed one thing to to what's going on in this country versus Elon Musk, who this is not a zero sum game. He didn't steal the trillion dollars from other people. He didn't take it out of babies' mouths. It's not that people aren't getting, it's not a zero-sum game.

7:30This is creating wealth. And you got, like I said, you got a place like Norway. Their entire GDP, no one in Norway has ever created anything close to this in terms of wealth and impact on society and the future possibilities of what Elon Musk is doing. Maybe Walter Isaacson can say all this when he comes on. So I'm not going to take the other side of this at all. Because you've been supportive of his pay packages in the past. I have, 100%. And now if he can pull it off. I remain that way. If he can pull it off. But I do want to say this. I do want to say this piece of it. Okay. I think that if you are Elon Musk or you are the elites in this country, to not consider what's going on here.

8:15No one's denying it. No, no. Well, and try to figure out how either to fix it, fix it and or make it seem and not just seem, feel fairer. So we often talk about the tax code, people paying taxes. It seems to me that there's so much low hanging fruit. I've been talking about this forever. That would make the country both more economically viable and it would end. I think people would say, OK, people are paying their fair share that it might change some of the dynamic around this. But there's so much pushback on the other side around, you know, whether it's estate taxes we've talked about over the years or carried interest.

8:53Or I would argue to you that potentially capital gains taxes at the at a super at the super high end. If you want to, you know, there are things that we could do. I agree. That might be necessary, but not sufficient. You can raise more money, but you still don't know what the hell to do with it. We've got a lot of money now. We failed at solving all these problems. Jamie Dimon talked about it yesterday. today, the bottom 20 % of the country, they don't live in a safe place. They don't get decent education. They don't have any upward mobility. There's a lot of problems, but just simple transfer payments from the haves to the have nots is not going to do it.

9:27I'm not saying it's transfer payments into itself. Okay. You just want to raise taxes to do what with? Because I think there's lots of things that you would want to do. We do a lot. We try to do a lot of things already and we fail miserably. We fail miserably, but I think both on the education side of how we do things. How are you going to fix that? charter schools? You got one side with the teachers union that won't allow any charter schools. I understand. I believe that ultimately the charter school approach is going to be a much better, not across the board, but to create competition in the business is completely and utterly necessary on health care.

10:00Not everyone agrees with you there. Not everyone. No, no. Look, I think few people, I think on a certain, in a certain party, I think that the unions in the, school systems unfortunately have created a demonstrable problem that needs to be fixed self-serving but that doesn't mean we need to break up the unions it means there's other things that we can do okay health care what do you want to do with health care that's a it's an issue that we need to fix we've tried to fix it obama the unaffordable care act did not fix it we need to do a lot more than that to try to figure out maybe we go do you want to just have carte blanche for all health care across the board some a lot of countries have that a lot of people argue for Will that fix it?

10:39Or will we have flat GDP for 15 years like Canada? I'm not sure having better health care is going to create flat GDP in America. No, having worse health care. Spending all your money trying to do that one way or another. Canada's got a lot of problems. And I'm responding to some of the mail that I get sometimes, which has caused me to look at really what's happened over the last 10, 15 years. But I think spending more money on infrastructure will, by the way, pay dividends down the road. pay dividends in terms of just our ability to grow as a country. Spending money on infrastructure and you're going to say picking winners and losers because Trump does it too.

11:16But infrastructure and the way that it was done with, you know, you've got to force a transition to clean energy. You've got to do renewables. You've got to have electrical vehicle mandates by 2030. That type of infrastructure isn't helping anyone. Did you see the news on Ford? I did see the news on Ford. They've lost$13 billion on the EV transition, and they're going to stop making it. Who buys, who of these rednecks out in the middle of the country buys an F-150 that's electric? None of them. But here's the other problem. We're now getting into a situation in this country where, because of the tariffs that we've put together, we will never have a competitive car, automobile industry, ever.

12:00I saw someone say if the tariffs get struck down, the market's going to go up 5 ,000 points if the tariffs get struck down. I don't believe, I don't happen to believe that's the case. I think it would be somewhere in the middle. But we may get to find out what happened. But I do think. I'm sorry about the Ford. Maybe some other people buy electric. But you know what I mean. Guys with the cowboy hats down in Texas probably aren't plugging in there. They like the big gas guzzling. That's a best-selling vehicle. All I'm saying is that to not be, not just cognizant, but we need to think more about what is going on in this country and why some of this country feels the way they do.

12:37You and I may not feel this way, but we've got to figure it out. We've just got to spend more time on that. We've been hearing this from Dalio for 10 years. We have a civil war, and we do need to pay attention to it. And there's no doubt. But then part of the reason that these tariffs, that Trump is even trying to do it, is to try to address the hollowed out middle class in the middle of the country. Where capitalism, it's not capitalism's fault. It's the way that capitalism is sort of poisoned by different government regulation. But globalization, when you can get$2 an hour workers in the rest of the world, you saw what happened.

13:18We lost how many thousands of factories? in the middle of the country. Does tariffs fix that? How do we... No, but the other question is, would we be better off actually trying to upskill those workers that would have historically been involved in manufacturing and move them into a services economy? There are apparently Ivy Leaguers that have philosophy degrees that are jealous of guys that know how to weld. Well, look, this is the next complication of AI and technology, which I think is going to make all of this that much... Short of UBI paid for by your billionaires, what's your answer? It's not paid for by billionaires.

13:52That's where you're going to get some of the money, right? Well, maybe you'd get some of the money from the billionaires. But the truth is, if you collected all of the money from the billionaires, you'd be six months into one year. Now you sound like me. But that doesn't mean that you don't want to collect some of it. Also, because you have people in this country who don't think that it's a fair system. And they're looking at that and saying, how is this happening? And you've got a lot of people using that as an excuse to not even try. Sure. But that's the point. And that's why you need to create a semblance of something that feels fair to people.

14:27I think of most countries in the world, the possibility of doing something here is better than anywhere else in terms of upward mobility. You disagree with that still. I don't disagree with that. I just think that it's not preordained. I don't think that this idea. We've worked to do. We've talked about how. You don't throw the baby out. American exceptionalism is not preordained. We have to work at it all the time. But it's capitalism. I saw someone read me yesterday. I'm leaving out all the good that socialism has done in the world. They brought up India and they brought up China. And it's like neither one of those places brought people out of poverty from socialism.

15:02They brought it out from pseudo forms of capitalism. We got to go. I'm told that there's actually news today. We just made some news. Warren Buffett says don't believe everything that you see the legendary investor found videos posted on Google that purport to be him but our video images or AI created images impersonating him and he called out the videos in a press release from Berkshire Hathaway last night it says in part Mr. Buffett is concerned that these types of fraudulent videos are becoming a spreading virus individuals who are less familiar with Mr. Buffett may believe that these videos are real and be misled by the contents.

15:49It's not the first time Buffett has flagged this type of content. The Berkshire release also pointing to this coming Monday when Buffett will release his annual Thanksgiving letter. If you see a video where he says, man, I just sold a lot of blank, or I just bought a lot of blank, it's not him. Because you only find out what he does from filings like months after. I have not seen these videos. No, I haven't either. I'm usually on my algorithm, I would think. But the way you'd want to use them is to pump a stock or to do something, I guess, try to manipulate something. I imagine somebody might try to do that.

16:24Right. I mean, I don't think it's dangerous that he's saying silly stuff or, I don't know, something funny, a meme type thing. It'd be something you'd try to use to... To manipulate. To manipulate something. Or to sell gold or something like that. Something like that. I mean, they've used your image, not AI, but they've used your image to try to sell gold or all sorts of things. They've used my image online in all sorts of wild ways. I've been recommending all kinds of stuff on some of these. If it has some weird, like, eight in my handle, instead of just at Joe Swack, it's not me. It's just, and I'm not on Facebook, and I'm not on Instagram.

17:00So it's either Twitter or nothing, and I've got my checkmark. You've got your checkmark. And I've got tens of dozens of followers. So that should be. Well, after you've blocked all the others. Coming up, folks. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, Dr. Mehmet Oz joins us. Different than Oz Perlin. They both do different forms of magic. He now runs the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, and the Trump administration has announced negotiated lower prices for popular prescription weight loss drugs. We're making it easier for companies to say yes, to bringing their prices in line with what other countries are paying.

17:38It's fairer for America, but it's also more sustainable for these pharmaceutical companies. And that's why, in general, their stock prices are staying strong. Plus, how the quick-thinking doctor reacted when an attendee at the White House announcement needed medical attention right after this.

17:59Welcome back. This is Squawk Pod from CNBC. today with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here's Andrew. The White House reaching deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to cut prices for their popular weight loss drugs. The Trump administration officials now saying that monthly out-of-pocket costs for injections and upcoming pills could range from$50 to$350 starting next year. That depends on dosage and insurance coverage as well. Medicare is going to start covering the drugs for obesity for the first time starting in mid-2026. We're going to speak with the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

18:37Dr. Oz is going to be with us. Different than Oz Perlman. They both do different forms of magic. Wow, that's nice of you to say that about Mehmet. Mehmet has saved lives. That's magic unto itself. Mehmet was one of the leading surgeons for heart transplant. That's who Roger Altman wanted to do his heart transplant. So he's not just a guy on TV, like some of the other people in the administration, not just people on TV. Besides, we're on TV. Why are we trashing people on TV all the time? You're the one talking.

19:13White House announcing a deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to slash prices of obesity drugs. Joining us now at the details, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And we've seen a couple of instances of this, Mr. Secretary. And thank you for joining us. We appreciate you. I guess I should call you Mr. Administrator, not Mr. Secretary. But we appreciate you. That sounds weird, doesn't it? I'm going to call you Dr. Oz. Everybody knows that. Dr. Oz, I want to talk to you about really what Democrats want to open the government. But let's talk about this first.

19:52Is this a template for what we can do with a lot of different overpriced pharmaceuticals, if they are overpriced? Let's set the stage, Joe. I know you know this, but for everyone who doesn't appreciate how much of a ripoff we've been living through with global freeloading, the president adamantly has been saying that he will no longer tolerate the American people paying three times more for the exact same drugs made in the same factories, put the same bottles in the same boxes as folks pay in Europe. And so this most favored nation drug pricing strategy has resulted initially with a leading U.S.

20:24company, Pfizer, then a leading European company, AstraZeneca. Then we did all the fertility drugs. And today, maybe the biggest of all, because it's the single largest category of drug spend in America, these GLP-1 weight loss drugs. And the reason yesterday that we embarked on this voyage to try and share with America why this is such a critical opportunity is because if you're sitting in my seat, if you're administering Medicare and Medicaid and the exchanges, you need to figure out how to bend that cost curve down because they're increasing at 7, 8, 9 percent. And that's 3, 4, 5 percent faster than the economy is growing.

20:57So we've got to find a way of actually bringing the real costs down, not just throwing money at it to reduce what consumers pay, but actually bringing down total cost of care. And if you're going to drop drug prices meaningfully, you'll do that. But in particular, in this category, because of all the things we can do, Joe, reducing obesity in America not only buys us a lot of health, but it also reduces the health care spend. We estimate that obesity by itself probably explains a quarter of the total health care costs. And so by using these medications, which on average can drop your weight 15, 20 percent over the course of a year.

21:31And again, obesity is not an absence of GLP-1s. You have to use diet, exercise, all the Maha elements that Secretary Kennedy speaks of are vital to this process. But part of making life easier, making yourself healthier and making it easy to be healthy, which is what Maha is really about, is using medications if they're effective. So most Americans would consider this if they were overweight. And a third of us are. Unfortunately, most Americans can't afford these drugs. They're$1 ,200,$1 ,300 a month. So in this deal, we are reducing the cost on average to about$250 a month. And if you're on Medicare, which I administer, you're going to pay$50 copay and government will pick up the rest.

22:13And we can afford that because at that price point, within two years, it'll be cost neutral. It'll save us so much by reducing downstream problems of obesity like hypertension and problems with diabetes and even bigger problems like renal failure, strokes, heart attacks, dementia. that we'll actually start saving money. And if you're on Medicaid, it'll be free to you, which is still okay because governors have a moral hazard right now. Obesity is rampant in underserved vulnerable populations, but they're the ones who benefit the most as well and reduce costs when you do that. So we'll actually help state budgets by driving down these prices.

22:48The narrative of the pharmaceutical companies, doctor, was that the way Europe offered these drugs at much lower prices was basically price controls. And, you know, the innovation is done here in this country. And in this country, we allow companies that spend a lot of money up front on research and development of these great drugs. We allow them to recoup all that investment, whereas if it was in Europe and you and you don't allow them to price the drugs to where you can actually benefit from all your research and development, there's there's not as much innovation over there. And if we import those price controls here, the argument is from the pharmaceutical industry that they're not going to be able to afford innovation and testing on new drugs.

23:36Is that totally false or is the truth somewhere in the middle? I think that specific narrative is false. And my evidence for that is all these drug companies, Eli Lilly and Novo Norris are well-run companies. Their CEOs were in the Oval Office. They came there willingly. They were not hostages. They've all signed these deals. Pfizer did too. AstraZeneca as well. Well, the argument that we're making and they're agreeing with is that it's inherently unfair for us to pay three times more. We still pay most of the money for development. But I hear the concern that we need to be able to innovate. And so if you get Europeans to pay a bit more, we can pay a bit less.

24:09Also, some of the areas we're giving opportunities to companies include giving them access to larger populations by making these drugs more affordable. But, Joe, here's the real conversation. You sit in a room with these executives. You look him in the eye and say, you went into this business because at some point you really cared about people. And as an American, and in the case of Eli Lilly's CEO he is, he said, you really want to have your legacy about making an innovative medication class that is changing lives accessible to everybody. It's the most American thing we can do. It's about fairness.