Kevin Mayer, Fmr. TikTok CEO & Disney Executive 9/23/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Jimmy Kimmel returns. There's no way Disney was going to have the spine to stand up to the woke mob. CEO Bob Iger's decision to suspend and then reinstate the late night host and manage political and public pressure once an insider at the company former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer weighs in. Half is going to be angry no matter what you do. So I think Bob just has to do what he thinks is right for the company. And the future of Silicon Valley with one of the investors who helped build it. Hemant Taneja is CEO of General Catalyst.

0:39He's backed the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Snap, Mistral AI. And he says it's time for change. You can't rush and focus on the traditional Silicon Valley mantra of, hey, let's just grow these businesses fast and deal with the consequences later. It really has to be a lot more intentional. Plus, CEOs respond to new rules for visas for international workers. and NVIDIA giving$100 billion to open AI for data centers and to supply chips. When you get into sort of the vendor financing of your own industry, it sort of becomes this cyclical thing, which could be virtuous or, you know, vicious. It's Tuesday, September 23rd.

1:17SquawkPod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue it, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Meantime, let's talk about NVIDIA and those shares coming off another record. Hi, the company is going to be investing up to$100 billion in OpenAI. The AI lab attempts to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers based on NVIDIA processors. The company said that OpenAI is planning to deploy NVIDIA systems that require 10 gigawatts of power, roughly the power from four Hoover dams.

1:58In an interview with CNBC, NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Wang, calling this the biggest AI infrastructure project in history. This is additive. This project, 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure, is additive to everything that has been announced and contracted. Remember, they've contracted huge amounts of capacity through Azure, through OCI, through CoreWeave. And all of that is powered by NVIDIA, and we're really delighted working with all of these partners. And that's going to continue to grow. The same interview, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, talked about the off-the-charts demand for AI. The compute constraints that the whole industry has been in, our company in particular, have been terrible.

2:41We're so limited right now in the services we can offer. There's so much more demand than what we can do. And as we look forward another year or two years, if you have, you know, let's say it takes 10 gigawatts of compute or 5 gigawatts of compute, you could choose one of two things. You could choose to cure cancer by having AI do a bunch of research, or you could choose to offer free education to everybody on Earth. No one wants to make that choice. And so increasingly as we see this, the answer is just much more capacity so that we can serve the massive needs and opportunity with this. The news from NVIDIA and OpenAI moving stocks throughout the chip sector.

3:15AMD rising yesterday, but Broadcom moved lower. Taiwan Semiconductor, Dell, and Supermicro all closing higher. And the only thing that I thought, my only skepticism about this is whether you like the idea that a chip maker is ultimately funding an AI company to basically fund themselves. Remember when Cisco back in the day, there were there were these kind of periods of time where this is like vendor financing. If you if you think sort of through what that actually means. And you're questioning whether there's demand beyond this, outside of this, or if the ecosystem is hitting itself. When you get into the vendor financing of your own industry, it sort of becomes this unique cyclical thing, which could be virtuous or vicious, depending on how you look at it.

4:08Competition-wise, I guess, but I'm pulling form. Oh, no, I would like all of this to work. I'm curious. I think I would before it kills me because I'm superfluous. AI I'm talking about. We said the power of four Hoover dams. That doesn't, I kind of understand. I guess a lot of power comes from the Hoover Dam. But it doesn't quantify exactly what it means. The biggest electric generating plant in the country is a nuclear plant that generates 4.66 GW gigawatts. And they're talking about deploying 10. and it hasn't even been possible to do this. Right, there have been questions raised about this.

4:49It takes seven years to get permitting for a nuclear facility to do some of these electrical things. Look, my guess is the government is probably on board with trying to streamline some of the permitting process and get some of these things done more quickly if they possibly can. And Sam Altman, I understand what he laid out here, this idea that you can either cure cancer or provide free education for everyone, But that's not everything that we're using AI for at this point. AI might do both. So if we get it really going, it's, NVIDIA is going to, for each gigawatt, they're going to invest$100 billion.

5:24So if they're going for$10, I used AI in my own brain. That's a trillion dollars. No, it's$1 ,100 billion. $1 ,100 billion. All right. How do you think this changes the competition? 1 times 10 to the 9. With all the other AI and large language models. So that's the other thing that's going to be so interesting. Because now, in the same way that the government has a stake in Intel and you have to pull for Intel. And so does NVIDIA, by the way. Right. NVIDIA not only has to pull, now NVIDIA has to pull for Intel. NVIDIA has to pull for, NVIDIA always had to pull for OpenAI, right? Because clearly they were buying a lot of their chips.

6:05Now you have to pull for them even more. And the question is, do you end up pulling for them more than Google or Anthropic or Microsoft or somebody else? Well, Microsoft is part of OpenAI now, or at least has that partnership. What does that ultimately look like and how does that work? That's a good question. Another question I have initially had was, does this just mean they're going to be providing chips to them for this? And it's not. It's a cash infusion that they're putting into this. But, yeah, a lot of questions. What's your favorite? now i've gotten mad a couple of times yeah i have i use that in chat gpd at least those are they're next to each other on three or four occasions they've given me a definitive answer with the first question and then i said you better check your facts and and the idiot does and he comes back with a completely 180 degree answer says oh yeah you're right it doesn't go and then i ask why did you tell me so definitive?

7:02Well, you ask it in general terms and it didn't really cause me to look into it. You found someone new to fight with. I did. I've called them useless. We're all happy. AI is even more useful than we realize. Why would you say it if you didn't know? And it answers. It's a scary thing. So we got to pull for open AI because then perplexity has something better to steal. Right? Then they can, is that how it works? What's it called? Scraping? No, they're not stealing. They have a partnership. And that'll mean stealing, but they don't do. They just kind of collect everybody else's data. So maybe everybody else's.

7:41Isn't that kind of what we do? I guess we do. I guess we do. Disney is bringing back Jimmy Kimmel Live to ABC tonight. In a statement, Disney said, We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy. And after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday to absolutely no one's surprise. This was our conversation on Squawk Box last Friday. You think Disney was going to take out Kimmel anyway? Someday. Oh, someday. And I still think Kimmel's coming back next week. I think Kimmel might come back. I think he's coming back next week. And like I said, the applause will make Colbert's reception at the Emmy look, the Emmys look tame.

8:28People be hanging from the rafters cheering on the hero, Jimmy Kimmel, who is not Lenny Bruce. As you know, ABC polled Kimmel's show last week, a few days after the host made comments linking the alleged killer of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to President Trump's MAGA movement. A person familiar with the matter says Kimmel's going to address it tonight. But there was no doubt in my mind that there's no way Disney was going to have the spine to stand up to the woke mob. mob. Disney is a charter member of the woke mob. So there's no way that that was going to happen. I think it's going to get interesting now because we'll see what Next Star does.

9:07Unclear what Next Star is going to do, whether it will return the show to its affiliates across the U.S. At this point, smaller station owner Sinclair says it's not planning to air Kimmel's show, but discussions with ABC are ongoing. You know, I still go to Drudge. I always feel like I need to take a shower after I look at it, but they've been running Disney World empty as Americans fear tourism is finished in Florida. They already got problems. If they have zero MAGA parents bringing their kids to Disney after this, that's going to be a problem. For me, it doesn't affect me. I go to bed at 8.30.

9:46You know what affects me? I watch Frank. I take the hour that I would have been, Frank Holland. Frank Holland in the morning. I take the hour I would have been watching late night, and I. Good for you. I put worldwide exchange on to see what the word of the day is going to be. Real Homer. Yeah. To see what the word of the day is. So it doesn't affect me, but I do think it's pretty effed up that we have talked 10 times more about Jimmy Kimmel in the media world than Charlie Kirk for the past three or four days. And I think something's really messed up there. But that's just me. There's talk, already speculation, about how long-term of a move this is.

10:24Jimmy Kimmel's contract is up in May of this year. See how the ratings do now, when they have no affiliates. But you know what? It was years ago. I remember Kimmel saying, I don't care if I don't get half of the U.S., half the audience. I don't care if any conservative ever watches. Remember, he said that. I don't remember him saying that. He verbally said that. Don't mess with my memory. What day is it? You're Becky, right? All right, Aaron. What's coming up, Aaron? J.P. Morgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon, becoming the latest high-profile business leader to sound off on the Trump administration's changes to the H-1B visas.

11:03The president announcing they'll soon cost$100 ,000 for new workers. Speaking with our colleagues at CNBC-TV 18 in India during the bank summit there, Dimon said the changes caught everyone off guard. I believe in merit-based immigration. You know, as a matter of fact, I would beg the president, he has accomplished border control. That's great. I mean, I think all nations want real border control. It helps make a nation. But after that, we should have good immigration. We also heard from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on H-1Bs yesterday in their interview with CNBC's John Fort.

11:45We want all the brightest minds to come to the United States. And remember, immigration is the foundation of the American dream. And we represent the American dream. And so I think immigration is really important to our company and it's really important to our nation's future. And I'm glad to see President Trump making the moves he's making. Wong saying immigration is critical to his company in America's future. And Altman saying it's important to bring the smartest people into the U.S. I saw a lot of stuff on social media that do illustrate the other side, that it's, for years, not necessarily really high-tech people have been hired in India and other places.

12:27The average is$167 ,000, maybe$165 ,000. People in the United States at the expense of people that are totally qualified in the United States. And it also might allow companies to do that without doing the training, which you could be doing for people in the United States. I mean, I can see the rationale. I can see both sides of it. We had Robert Frank here yesterday, and he talked to us a little bit off camera. I've asked for him to come back tomorrow and say a little bit because he's been doing research on this, talking to immigration lawyers who tell him that this has been abused. It's a system that's been abused.

13:00We want the best and brightest, but we want... We want to pay market salaries for people to be coming in. 71 % of these visas go to people from India. Another 11 % are going to people from China. There is a 6 % unemployment rate right now, Robert mentioned, that is for recent graduates. So it's much higher than the average unemployment rate. And there are questions about a lot of things that could be causing this, whether it's AI, whether it's a slowdown in the economy or employers thinking they want to make, they just want to hold on to the people they have and not bring new people in. But there are some valid questions to be asked about whether the system has been abused, particularly.

13:39You can't do it remotely from India. There was something weird because it did say that there are people who are still overseas who have these visas. Maybe they can come and go back and forth. Maybe that's what it is. But they're all the call centers. We know that, you know, when you're really doing anything on the phone. I don't think these visas are. The question to me, though, is how much how I mean, I'd say, how terrible is the abuse? Because there is a trade-off. And that's the fundamental question. If you told me that you could get back 10 or 20 ,000 jobs, how do I think about that in the grander context of innovation and trying to have the best people want to come here?

14:22If you looked at where the breakdown was, 10 ,000 of these visas are held by Amazon employees, another 5 ,000 each, I think, by Meta and Microsoft. And then there's another one of the MAG, the MAG-7 that takes up, almost 28 ,000, almost half of these visas are taken up by the MAG-7. And that's an area where they could probably just be paying more. It's not a whole on-shoring phenomenon. You have to do the same trade-offs. And people would say for 40 years, we didn't care about those trade-offs. It's just torpedoes be damned. We're going to get the cheapest labor and we're going to get the highest profit.

14:59But if we bring back stuff that shouldn't be made here to get American jobs, it's probably going to cost more than it normally would, which could long term hurt innovation. So every one of these. It's the innovation question. This one is the innovation trade off. Some of it are used by doctors and there was an issue that was brought up to the administration saying, look, this could hurt rural areas where you can't find a doctor who will come in. The administration responded by saying we could do exemptions for things that we think are important for the country. So maybe there's a way to cut it back.

15:28That's why I said, is there a way for the Mag 7, they can pay if these if if those are the ones that are being abused. Let's try to focus on those. I'm just curious and don't want to obviously cut off our nose. There's a whole movement where people say I'll pay more for something made in America. And it's obviously going to be that there are people who want to want to do that. Who are those people? There's a lot of people that say, I'll pay more. I want it made here. People that want American jobs here, I'll pay more. They say that. They say it. And they don't do that. They say it. No, they say it and they don't do it.

16:04And that's the most important part. We have a governor's race in New Jersey. And one of the candidates says, you know, renewables, they're going to cost you an arm or a leg. But you'll do it if you're a good person. And that's the same thing. Do people really want to pay that much more? And you can see what's the same argument that you would make to me. And this is why to me it doesn't make sense. I was going to say, here we are in New York, and you'd say Mondami wants to raise taxes. And you would say, well, if the taxes go up, people are going to say they're going to leave. Well, are they not just going to say, I'm going to live here and I'm happy to pay more?

16:38That's the point. What's a matter of degrees? Well, no, but if you're willing to say, look, by raising the price people... I'm not saying that people that want to say, I'll pay more for American-made goods, I'm not saying that they're really going to do it one way or not. I'm just saying there is a movement where, you know, with what we've seen. J.D. Vance is the reason, right, the reason that he's, you know, he's gotten aware of it. There's a political movement, but I don't believe there's an economic movement. Well, you haven't lost your job to one of the 80 ,000 factories that were shut down.

17:09No, no, no. I'm just saying that I don't believe that we're seeing people go out and because it says, unfortunately, say Made in America, that they're willing to pay more for that product. But they elected this guy because that was one of the major themes, was the hollowing out of the middle class. Oh, I understand what the promise was. Okay. I'm just saying that it is an argument that people make. I'm willing to pay more if we can do it here. They've been playing the music over us. Made in America. Made in America. Just like Squawk. We'll come back. Cheese will be next. Still to come, former Disney executive, briefly the CEO of TikTok, Kevin Mayer, an insider's look at Disney's Jimmy Kimmel dilemma and at TikTok's path forward in the U.S.

17:50There's the code that exists in China. They're going to take that same code, move it over to Oracle-supported servers. And then I think the code will be managed separately. Squawk Pod will be right back.

18:08Welcome back to Squawk Pod. Our next interview is a rare one with Kevin Mayer, the former CEO of TikTok and COO of its parent company, ByteDance. That was a job he held for three turbulent months back in the summer of 2020. This was in President Trump's first term when the push to ban TikTok due to its Chinese ownership first began. Prior to his stint at TikTok, Mare spent about two decades at Disney, where he ultimately led the entire direct-to-consumer business, which included the streamers Disney +, ESPN +, and Hulu. Nowadays, Mare is at Candle Media, a creator-focused digital media brand that he co-founded in 2022 with another Disney alum.

18:48It maintains brands like Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine and the parent of kid-centric YouTube sensation Coco Melon. Candle Media has significant investment from Blackstone. Let's get back to Joe, Becky, and Andrew. President Trump planning to sign an executive order this week supporting a deal that keeps TikTok operating in the U.S. under a new American-led joint venture overseen by Oracle. Joining us right now is Kevin Mayer. He's Candle Media's co-CEO. He was also the former CEO of TikTok, was a senior executive, of course, at Disney. And so there is so much to talk to you about. I can't even get over all the headlines.

19:23But let's start with TikTok. You lived inside TikTok for a hot minute or so, maybe a little more than that. A little more than a minute, but yeah, not long. So I'm curious now, when you look at this deal, do you say to yourself, this is going to be a great success? Do you think that people are going to, I mean, it sounds like people are going to have to re-download this app. I don't know how you think this is all going to work. I'm not sure people need to re-download the app, but here's what I understand about the deal. And it's what I've read in the press mostly, and I don't have that much insider information, but I'll say this.

19:54ByteDance will own less than 20%. So that's good and that comports with the law, I believe. New investors are coming in. I think they're very high quality investors. You have Silver Lake Partners, big investor, big private equity firm, Andreessen Horowitz from what I understand, and most importantly, Oracle. And Oracle seems to be the company that's gonna oversee data safety and oversee the algorithm. Do you believe the Murdochs are gonna be part of this or just on the board? I don't know, that came in really late and I don't know if they're actually in it or not. When you joined the company, Did you ever think to yourself that the Chinese, the government, was using this app for nefarious purposes or would use it for nefarious purposes?

20:33It's very hard for me to say. I was there in 2020. My entire tenure was on Zoom. So it was a very, very awkward moment. But I will say the two things, the two concerns that were expressed by the American government were, one, data flowing to the Chinese Communist Party. That's solved now with Oracle taking charge of that perimeter. And I don't think there's any data coming in out of China against that perimeter. I think that's pretty safe. The other was the algorithm itself being used to feed videos to Americans and other Westerners and use it for propaganda. And I think with Oracle's oversight of the algorithm and the separate instances of the algorithm that are going to be part of this deal, I believe that solves.

21:12What are the separate instances? I still don't understand the technical. Well, I understand it, and I could be wrong. I think the details are a little bit murky, actually. But I think there's the code that exists in China. They're going to take that same code, move it over to Oracle-supported servers. And then I think the code will be managed separately. And so as improvements happen, some of that code might come from China to the U.S., but if so, it'll be very thoroughly embedded. So no black box. No black box in that. Yeah, exactly. Do you believe that the algorithm can be updated and effectively be as good and as effective living in a separate environment run by Oracle as it has by ByteDance?

21:50That was a big question five years ago when I was grappling with that, when I was CEO of TikTok. I think AI generally, and that algorithm is an AI curation recommendation algorithm. It's a little better understood. And people and engineers in the West have been working on AI, and AI is in everyone's lips these days. So do I believe that American engineers have the capability to understand, get underneath the code of that algorithm, and update it and operate it on their own, and maybe have two divergent code bases over time, China versus the U.S.? I do believe that can happen. Let me switch gears on you for a moment.

22:26Put your old Disney hat on for a moment. What did you think when this whole Kimmel situation went down, and what do you think now? It's a tricky situation, obviously. I know if you're Bob Iger, who's a very good friend of mine, my mentor for years, and a very courageous CEO, as far as I'm concerned, and a great CEO, you're faced with a bit of a tricky time. On the one hand, Sinclair, Nextar, 70 % of your base of local stations who clear your programming threaten to not show the Jimmy Kimmel show. On the other hand, Jimmy Kimmel is an old friend and a great talent. and I'm sure Bob did not want to take that show off the air.

23:05So look, it was a tough call. That's what Bob gets paid to do. I respect him and I respect Jimmy. Now that it's resolved, I hope it just moves forward. Okay, let me ask you a harder question. How much of the pressure that was brought to bear on Iger do you believe was political? Which is to say that do you believe that Nextar, which pulled Kimmel, was doing that because of a view that advertisers and an audience were going to walk away from them, or they were doing that because they were worried that Brendan Carr was not going to approve the transaction to allow them to merge? The answer is I don't know.

23:48I really don't know. I wasn't involved in those discussions. I don't know what Nextar's CEO is thinking. You're right. Both things matter. Was he going to lose an audience? And both things can be true, by the way. Both things can be true. I just don't know which they are. But I know Brandi Carr was interested in this situation, and he has to approve that merger that they're undertaking. What do you think about Sinclair? I mean, the other piece of this is, at least thus far, I don't know what will happen tonight, but it doesn't sound like these affiliates are necessarily going to carry Jimmy Kimmel.

24:18That's really going to be up to Sinclair to decide what to do with that. But you understand better than anybody the dynamic between a Disney and its affiliates and how that works. Right. Some of these affiliates, by the way, they need the Super Bowl a year from now. They're going to want certain aspects of what Disney and ABC are providing. But this idea that you can sort of pick and choose off of a Chinese menu. I don't know if that is allowed either. I think and I think we're back to the seven. What were they? Magical creatures. and what the Disney, like, look at that bomb of, what was that snow?

24:52We're talking about, there's a lot of people that aren't going to go to the theme parks because they're MAGA now. They're furious about that. I mean, this is going to be brand damage for Disney if they left them off or if they brought them back. Half the country's going to be mad if they left them off. The other half is going to be mad that they're bringing them back. I think it's a real brand problem. But Joe, as you're saying, you know, half is going to be angry no matter what you do. So I think Bob just has to do what he thinks is right for the company. He's a steward of shareholders' value at Disney.