Pivot - Is Elon's Offer Serious? Plus, Inflation, Astroturfing, and DAOs

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

The Elon and Twitter saga continues: Kara and Scott talk about Musk’s offer to buy all of Twitter for $43 billion. Also, inflation, price gouging vs supply and demand, and more trouble at the Texas border. Then, a listener question, and Wins and Fails. Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa, at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and say you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway. What should we talk about today? What are we going to talk about? Let me think. Let me think. People are begging for us to talk about this. They are begging. Let us talk about Elon Musk, his offer to buy Twitter.

Obviously, we can talk about inflation and everything else. And we have a listener question about AstroTurf campaigns. But really, it's really just Elon. Very briefly, we will discuss other things. Should we or just let's just move on? What should we do? No one wants to talk about TikTok or whatever else we were going to talk about. Yeah, or Ethereum, anything else. No one cares. You know what? We're just going to get to the big story. Elon Musk must really want that edit button after failing to join the board. Musk is now offering to buy Twitter, all of it, the whole company for around $43 billion.

For good measure, he slipped in a 420 joke. That's his weed o'clock joke in his offer. 54.20 per share. He's done that before when he offered to buy, take Twitter, Tesla private for $420 when he, and he said funding secured when he didn't have the funding secured. It cost him, and Twitter, Tesla, big fines of $20 million each. In the SEC filing, Musk says he'll unlock the company's extraordinary potential and defend free speech. He also faces a lawsuit from Twitter investors who say he didn't disclose his stake in the company early enough.

Musk allegedly missed a key disclosure deadline by two weeks, which gave him a bunch of money. But that's sort of in the rear view mirror because of this bid. This is interesting. I had a little back and forth with a couple of people. Last week, I tweeted, all bets are off. And I thought that he could do it. It was a very big reach for him. You thought he wouldn't, that he'd go away. Here we are. I'm going to ask our listeners for a certain amount of grace. We are recording this at approximately 1045 on Thursday morning. So quite frankly, by the time you listen to this podcast, a lot of new information might have come out. So we're looking at this through the lens at 1045 a.m. on Thursday morning. My whole point was, I don't know what he's going to do. And

that's how I look at everything Elon does, that he kind of, it's just like him to try something like this. Agreed. He's got Morgan Stanley as his advisor. And to me, $43 billion is very cheap for one of the most high-profile bots on the internet, which is Twitter. Even if its business is met, its stock is met, it really does have enormous potential that no one's been able to unlock as a public company. And he says he will unlock it. Only he can unlock it. Only I can fix this.

Yes. Yeah. Although, you know, honestly, compared to Trump, Elon does have a record of very substantive achievements. Agreed. So what do you think? What do you think? Well, first, I just – I feel as if I have an obligation. My first job and the only job I've ever had was at Morgan Stanley.

So I feel an obligation to reach out to my peers and inform them that unless they got an upfront fee for this, and if it's like a traditional M&A deal where they only get paid on the consummation of a transaction, their late nights and really good work, which they will do here, We'll have the same payoff as an engineer working on Oculus or the Portal or Libra. And that is the market. I'm not going to happen. The market opened today on an offer, I don't know, 20% or 25% of the market was, hey, Elon, you're full of shit. The stock isn't even up. And here's the thing. And I made the mistake of turning on CNBC where every anchor was touching themselves over this offer. Is there a critical thinking

test you must fail to be on air at CNBC? I mean, within about five fucking minutes, it's pretty obvious this is a ridiculous bullshit offer. And let's walk through all the reasons why. It is cheap. I was arguing, though, with Bill Cohen, who is a very good analyst who thought there, you know, who wrote about this. Bill Cohen, Vanity Fair Cohen? Yeah, yeah. But now he's at Puck. Yeah, yeah. That guy's a clear blue flame. Yeah, he thought it might be serious. That who's going to go against him? That is the thing. There's no, okay, okay. All right, I'm just saying. Let's break it down. Let's break it down. All right, break it down. Break it down. You think it's a game. I think, I don't know.

Go ahead. This is, read the filing. My best and final offer. Okay. Yeah. Let me tell you how many deals end up at the initial price. None. None.

Yes. This is nothing but- Usually higher. Usually higher. This is nothing but cloud cover for him selling his shares. Similar to this bullshit poll where he pretended that he was thinking about selling his shares. He is trying to create cloud cover to get the hell out. Okay, so first off, I sold my shares.

And make some money in the process, correct. He's offered $54 a share. It was trading at $54 in October. It was trading. It was $77 in last February. I sold my shares just a while ago at 56. So the average, he's made an offer at an average 52-week, at the average 52-week stock price, which is not a premium. So his share, even if the board agreed to it, the shareholders would step in and go,

sorry, girlfriends, we are not selling for this. And then this notion that this is my best and final offer, and I will reconsider my position. This is the equivalent of another one of these polls that he should stick up his ass, but instead it's nothing but a false flag to try and pretend this is a serious offer. It's not a serious offer. It's cloud cover to sell his share. So let's go one level deeper. All right. Okay. No one seems to be able to do math here. He can't afford this. And you know why? Well, now wait.

Now wait. I'm going to press back. You say why, and then I will push back on that. Go ahead. Okay. Called $44 billion. He has to come up with $40 billion. There's a few ways he could finance this.

The first is with debt, and he can't because his company has no EBITDA. No firm is going to loan him more than a billion or a few billion dollars. So he has to come up with $40 billion in equity. He could go to his friends and say, hey, rich whack job, you put in $5 billion, you put in $10 billion. When you start talking about trace commas, even the craziest investors on the right, the takerist culture will start asking like, well, okay, beyond sort of your free speech maximalism, what is the actual strategy here? If we put Trump back on, which is the only thing I can figure out, this translates to action, how does that actually make this firm worth anything more? And let's imagine that it- Well, his point is private. It will be able to do things privately.

You know what would happen on the day it closes? What? 10 to 30% of the most valuable people in this company go, you know what? I put up with coming here instead of Google and I'm 10 to $20 million poorer than I would be if I'd gone to Google or Pinterest or any of these guys. And now you want to bring in a guy who brings volatility, has no strategy, and we're going private? They'd be like, that's it. I'm out. I'm going to Meta. I'm going somewhere else. And then what? What is the strategy here? And the billionaires, these guys, his buddies,

like their money more than they do of any bullshit notion around free speech, which is nothing but a push for, it's not a push for free speech. it's a push for fraudulent speech. Elon Musk wants to protect his army of bots that have artificially supported or juiced his stock price as evidenced by the great work that a Maryland professor has just done. They're going to start asking questions he can't answer. He can't raise the money for his friends. So then, really the only viable source of financing here is for him to borrow against his shares in Tesla. So he would have to borrow $40 billion against $200 to $300 billion in equity value. No single bank is going to be the bank that they'll do their analysis and go, if shit gets really awful here, we're not going to be the bank that's taken down by this guy's mania. So it'd be a number of

banks. They would put huge margin requirements, meaning, meaning that if Tesla's stock got cut in half, which it easily could, and it would still be one of the most valuable, wait, I think it'd still be the most valuable car company in the world, then all of a sudden, Elon Musk would get margin calls and be a forse seller of Tesla stock. You know whose stock goes down if this deal were somehow to go through and he were to raise the money against Tesla shares? Tesla stock would tank. There is no viable route to financing here.

And so the market is barely up. The market senses what CNBC and every other analyst can't seem to get to, and that is this is a bullshit offer. It's not going to happen. I would agree. I said that. It's a lowball offer, but it's not lowball enough. It's not an embarrassingly lowball offer, which is interesting.

The other thing is there are, like, will it set off interest by others? Because there is this under, at the very heart of what he's saying is correct. This is an underleveraged asset. Agreed. For some reason, they are not able to make it into what it should be at considering its position. It's how well known it is. It's not a business that's ever distinguished itself. And therefore, if you could get this property for under, you know, I think Mark Benioff in 2016 offered 20 billion for it at the time, if you

recall. He saw value here at 2020 billion, for sure, and actually changed his mind because he got so much pushback from Wall Street and others. Who would think this is valuable to them, despite the controversy? And that's one of the issues, is that other bidders, if you remember, Disney looked at it, and Mark was the closest to doing something. It's controversy. This time, Trump's not on there, so it's a little less controversial. But who would buy it? A hedge fund? Is there some value here that you can milk? And I think there is. That is one thing that I think he's got right. He's got absolutely right that he alone can do it. Not necessarily, right? And so who would be coming in here, one? Two, I think he does have a lot of rich crazy friends that

might be able to do this they want to own it i know i agree i agree peter teal is not is it likes money more than anything but look this guy is funding jd vans he's funding like they probably want to use the money to do things like that but it's certainly it's certainly an interesting thing if you're bored right i you You know, I wrote this column. I just crash wrote this column. And my son, you know, my son, one of my sons loved the 420 joke, thought it was funny. They liked it the last time. They'd snicker about it.

And then he immediately said, he's bored. And I think that was the best analysis I've ever heard. Like, he's bored. And I was like, yeah, that is correct and everything. And so one of the problems that one of the people who would be a possible buyer, I wrote them and I, you know, I've asked Apple. I think Apple would never do such a thing, you know, that kind of thing. I've asked all the obvious buyers.

One of the people who would be one of the obvious buyers said, you know, everything Elon Musk learned about business, he learned from Spaceballs, which I thought was really funny. But I do think there is some possibility that someone else will bid. Maybe not. And then what does he do? Is he going to be like the dog that caught the car? He pulls his bid? What does he do? I don't know what the Twitter board does. That's what I'd like to understand. He's going to try and position himself as a hero. We've seen this before. Buys Bitcoin. It's going to save the earth, which is terrible poor governance. Tesla shareholders don't need Tesla to go buy Bitcoin for them. And then decides it's bad for the environment,

sells it at a profit to plug his earnings shortfall. This is him pumping, and he's about to dump and use this as an excuse. I tried to save Twitter. I told them this was my best and final offer, and he's going to sell. And finny, finny. The same thing that happened at Etsy, at Dogecoin, at Shiba Inu, at Bitcoin is about to happen here. And that is, your son is right. Similar to the guy who lives up the road from me here, he has a pathological need to be the headline story every 48 hours. This just isn't a serious offer. I mean, there is a real quality to his stuff that he's making. It's very visionary and

everything else. And he has the right to say he's good at his instincts, right? And one of the things Mark Benioff said at the time in his book Trailblazer about his, he said his instincts were to buy it and he always loves going against naysayers. And then he actually physically fell, right, when he was going to make the pitch and hurt himself. He's a big guy and went down real hard. And he said the first time in his life he apologized to people because his instincts might have been wrong. And he listened to people who didn't agree with him, which I thought was interesting. Of course, Elon has nobody like that saying, what are you doing? That is a great point. And it's a lesson to powerful people. And I especially think it's

a lesson to young men whose testosterone results in biological predisposition to risk-taking. And that is, greatness is in the agency of others. And as soon as you get to a certain point, and it took me a long time to figure this out, in my view, you never want to make a big personal or professional decision without the benefit of personal or professional decision without the benefit of mentors and people to advise you. And a board, a good board, will occasionally just say, you need to rethink this. We understand your vision. And by the way, Elon Musk has been more right than wrong. When he has a vision for Mars, it's the right vision. And I think he can articulate something really compelling. And I don't understand half of what he's saying, but I'm like, this guy knows what he's talking about. When he talks about

moving equipment into the atmosphere for less money using reusable rockets, when he talks about electric vehicles, he has absolutely no vision here other than First Amendment blather. He hasn't been able to articulate- Free speech, not First Amendment, yeah. Well, okay. But none of it makes any sense. What does he want to kill a live puppy on Twitter spaces? What is he talking about, free speech? All right, so why wouldn't he just buy Gab, Parler, True Social, Rumble, Mastodon, Diaspora? Why wouldn't he do that?

This is the prize. Okay, why wouldn't he? My Great Dane just took a dump the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Why wouldn't he buy that? This is the prize. Okay, why wouldn't he? My Great Dane just took a dump the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Why wouldn't he buy that? There's more value in that than any of the firms you just mentioned. Okay. True social getter. And what's the other one? Gab. Gab. It's popular. Parlor. Mastodon. Rumble. Rumble. They love this whole big First Amendment free speech thing. And because they want a wallpaper over the fact that more people-

They're not very good businesses. More people are downloading curtains.com app than there's nobody on these platforms. They don't work. They are on Twitter. So this is the one. This is the one that someone wants to own. You summed it up. This is an undervalued.

He's got this right. Baller move, capitalist move. This is an undervalued asset. The problem is he's becomeer move, capitalist move, this is an undervalued asset. The problem is he's become a walking poison pill because of his errant behavior and his position. He will sell and he will use this as an excuse. This was my best and final. I tried to save the world for free speeches. I think he's going to sell and I think he's going to get out.

And then the thing could potentially be in play. As long as he's there, it's a poison pill. Now, you asked who could buy it. Yeah. The obvious one is Salesforce. But there's also all these fintech companies, PayPal. Yeah. I think Jack Dorsey would like to reunite his sister wives with Block.

All of these fintech companies have incredibly rich currency. Yeah. And their ability to integrate their products. I mean, a private equity firm might say this would be interesting. What's more likely here is an activist comes in. This is the play. This is the play. An activist comes in here and says, all right, clean up the bots and move to subscription.

Which Elon talked about. Many people have. But $2 or $3. Yeah, he ran the poll. And it's like, oh, where did we get that idea? Anyways, that's the play here. In terms of an outright acquisition, it's a fintech company, and the most likely one is Salesforce because the co-CEO is chairman of the board. And they've already demonstrated that they want it. He wrote the note to Brett Taylor, just for people who don't know who is the co-CEO of Salesforce, was formerly at a lot of different, very well-liked within Silicon Valley. He did also

take a slap at management. He thought management sucks and that they didn't know what they were doing. Of course, it is in a weird way a slap at Jack Dorsey, who he's close to or he supports, who has been running the thing forever. So that was kind of interesting. close to or he supports who has been running the thing forever. So that was kind of interesting. So what about these angry, I want to get to two things. They're angry investors who are suing him for the thing, the disclosure thing, which everyone's forgotten for the second. Oh, and who predicted that was going to happen? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know what would be a baller move? Just back to, I just want to, for a moment,

who might acquire them? You know what would be a baller move? And it's turning out, as much as I don't like some of the software skirting minimum wage practices, you know, who's become a very clear blue strategic thinker. And I wouldn't be surprised if he's thinking this right now. Cuban. No, Uber. Uber's got a $65 billion market cap. Say they give the combined firm, they give 40% of it to Twitter. What do you have if you had Uber and Twitter together? You'd have the U.S. equivalent of Super App. And that is Super Apps are a combination of transportation, payments, and social.

If they had two of the three legs of the stool, people would get very excited about what could be the first Super App in the United States. And Dara, I'm just consistently impressed. I think people – Dara doesn't get the credit he deserves for going into food. I don't think he could do that. I don't think he could do that. That doesn't – It'd be a very – Twitter is – All right.

Twitter has two ways to massively increase shareholder value. increase shareholder value. That is, one, adopt the most accretive action in business history and start to move to subscription and grab some of the surplus value from people who have 81 million followers. And instead of spending $2 billion a year on marketing, just start tweeting. You and I would pay something for Twitter every month. And right now, they're not making hardly any money off of us. The monetization of their terrible business model- Yes, which we've talked about. With their inferior sub-stack doesn't work.

I think it's a big move. I mean, I called all the obvious ones, like the Googles and the Apples and the, oh, no, no, no, no, no. You know, it's just such a ridiculous

like circus over there. And then they have to deal with Elon. You're right. Until he's out, they don't want anyone near. It was already problematic with Trump,

and now it's like, Elon, even worse. You know, that kind of thing. So let me ask you a question. What does Twitter do? What does Twitter do? By the end of the day or tomorrow, they very politely say, thank you for your offer. We have formed a special committee. We continue to serve in the best interest of all shareholders, and we believe your offer dramatically undervalues the firm. And they say, we remain open to conversations about how you or

any shareholder can add value. They're going to reject this out of hand as they should. And if they didn't reject it out of hand, these are smart people. This is not a serious offer. And by the way, the market already knows it's not a serious offer. The stock isn't up. So, look for the board to, in a crisp, full-throated way, to basically say, thank you, no thank you. And by the way, we hope you're the first man on Mars. That would be my hope for this individual. That would be funny if they did that. Good luck on Mars.

Elon Musk, the way to describe him, brilliant. We will get to Mars sooner because of him. Has catalyzed the race for electric and also, hands down, is the world's biggest troll. This is nothing but trolling. This isn't serious. You know what? I'm going to, again, push back. I think it's a little serious. I think he gets things into his head and he gets on them. And I think at the heart of it, as I said, is this is an undervalued asset and he seizes at a discount. If he got at a discount, I don't think he'd mind getting it at a discount. I think he sees it for lots of reasons as something that's valuable in some way. He also, you know, likes it. He likes owning it. He likes the idea of being king of Twitter. He's king of

everything else he owns, right? Gets to do whatever he wants. Two other questions I have. One is, what does the SEC do right now, given this other earlier stuff, as if this didn't happen? He's very, in this way, he's very Trump-like. It's like, now moving on from my SEC problems with the lack of disclosure when I first bought the stock, we're going to go, he's sort of going, kapow, look at over here. He's very, you know, Trump is on to the next outrageous thing. In this case, it's buying the company. And it's not outrageous. It's just people pay attention. And you know all the business media is going to go blah, blah, blah, or take it seriously.

But at the heart of it, I think, one, he really likes this company and wants to own it. And two, it's an undervalued asset. And someone, and it should, I have been talking about it going private for years because it can't do what it needs to do as a public company because it's under pressure. And so in the right hands, the right rich person, it could be, you know, you don't see Bezos coming in here at all. Like that's not something he would do. And in fact, Bezos is more down Elon's avenue politically, I would say, you know, kind of. Oh, I don't know. Bezos strikes me. I believe that Elon is firmly in this culture or this political viewpoint I call takerist. And that is, I rail against the same organization that has subsidized almost everything I do, whether it's NASA, whether it's DARPA, whether it's EV credits, whether it's the amazing investment California

taxpayers have invested in the University of California to produce engineers that go to work at Tesla to build amazing values such that he can peace out to Texas and not pay California taxes. I think Bezos, while is a master tax avoider and great at playing the Commonwealth offer for ridiculous subsidies in HQ2, I don't think he is up for the, I don't think he's a takerist. I think that Musk and some of his right-wing buddies have become total takerists where they rail on the government unless they have their hand out. And it's literally, they break their hand either waving this libertarian, weird bullshit where I hate the same organization

that is funding everything I do. And I don't think Bezos is like that. I think he's been a fantastic steward for the Washington Post. And we have a tendency to kind of lump all these people together. But I just want to go back to the math here, Kara, and I'm doubling down here. As strange as it sounds, he can't afford it. He can't finance it. Because... It's a lift. Well, let me just give you the boring logistics here. When I borrow money against my stocks or I take a position in options, Goldman does a

calculation and they look at my net worth and they look at the liquidity of my stocks and how concentrated I am in a stock. And I say, okay, if you want to borrow a million dollars against, they'll say, based on a bunch of factors, we need you to have $2 million in equity value. And when any big bank goes, okay, this one position going very, very wrong could sink the entire bank. Because we're talking about big money here. They're going to say, we need you to have, if you want to borrow $40 billion, and the only asset you can borrow $40 billion against is Tesla stock. An analyst is going to go, Tesla could feasibly go down 80%. It's gone up fivefold in the last three years or two years, which means it could go down 80%. If it goes down 80%, he has to start selling shares,

which puts further downward pressure on the stock and it could be an intellectual downward. He puts Tesla at risk. He puts Tesla, which has a lot of momentum right now, at risk. And by the way, let me just add, Apple is getting into this business. That is, you know, Elon is like the Netflix of this era. And there are going to be others, you know, that are moving in here with a lot greater resources. Even though he has a way far ahead,

he's technically so far and above anybody else and beyond, it doesn't mean that they can't catch up. It really doesn't. He's not magical. And so he is in a way, but he isn't, right? He's visionary, but not magical. And so you can see an Apple moving in here. The other competitors are going to get better and better. And so he's putting Tesla at risk, which is kind of fascinating because I think of all his loves, Tesla is his great love. Let's go back to some predictions we made. I think SpaceX is going to be worth more than Tesla, mostly because Tesla will decline in value. And also the most valuable list ever assembled is going to be the list that we all join when Tim Cook pulls back some dolphin-free, you know, ergonomically, ecologically made by Native Americans cloth that he pulls back and shows a piece of steel wrapped around four tires with an Apple logo on it.

And everyone's going to get on the list. And overnight, or nearly overnight, that list is going to become worth $100 billion, $150 billion, and that's all going to come from Tesla shareholders. Yeah. And somebody smart who— That is one company I don't ever— That's a company you cannot count out, even if they make... They have made very few mistakes. They have obviously a lot of hair on them

around the App Store, although Tim made a very big speech talking about sideloading and the dangers and that they're not a monopoly. And they have been declared by a judge not to be a monopoly because there is Android and they're not the biggest phone seller.

But nonetheless, they're going to do very well in cars, and they're going to do very well in AR glasses. Five years ago, the global auto industry was a low-margin manufacturing-based $660 billion sector. It is now a higher-margin, software-driven $1.7 trillion sector. And Tim Cook has to grow revenues by $250 billion over the next five years. So he's like, I can either go into healthcare, I can go into auto. And putting an Apple logo on a hospital kind of works, but putting an Apple logo on the front of a cool car, oh my God, disco. And so they are, I think, hard at work at a car. And they can announce it. They can do a Microsoft blocking move.

They can just put some shitty car up and put a logo on it and say, we're building a waiting list. They will not. They will not. It's just like their AR glasses. You know, obviously, Facebook did this whole jazz hands thing around the metaverse. I love jazz hands. I love that.

And Apple is ferreting away at their thing, and they will be beautiful. I just, you know, I sound like an Apple fan person, but they will make a beautiful product. They will, 100%. It's right in their wheelhouse. But here's the decision process that CNBC and everyone else will get to later today or tomorrow. And by the way, analysts are going to start to do the math and go, wait, it's not a serious offer. B, he can't afford it. you the math and go, wait, it's not a serious offer. B, he can't afford it. And C, soon enough,

Tesla analysts are going to go, this would be really bad for Tesla because the only way he can finance it is to put himself in a position potentially of being a for-seller of Tesla shares. If Tesla shares go down, if JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, all the people who would loan him this money against his shares, they'd say, okay, we'll do this, but we need you to have equity value of like 100 or 150 billion to cover this because we are not betting the firm on your misadventures in Twitter. And then if the stock gets cut in half, which any analyst at Tesla will go, even the bulls will go, that's a possibility that that could happen. Tesla analysts are going to begin to sharpen their pencils and go, this is really bad. This injects a massive amount of risk, exogenous risk, into Tesla shareholders that they don't need. There's no upside in this for them other than risk of their largest journal becoming a forced seller. at its heart it's a baller idea and that he's doing it is not as I'm like I

didn't know which one he'd do if someone was like I was on TV the other day and they're like what's he gonna do and I'm like I don't know something like you just don't know he zigs he zags and then he does something else so I think that at the heart he's correct I think it's very

expensive it's very very expensive to do this even though this number is low if that makes sense I think it's a low ball offer it's a big number it's a low ball offer that's not too low I think I was arguing with Bill about this but he was like who else is going to

come in and I was like maybe he doesn't want it really he wants to do something else he missed the baller move he missed the baller move you know what the baller move. We'll see. He missed the baller. You know what the baller move here is? What? What? What? The baller. I'm literally thinking, should I even say this? Because I'm scared he might do it. What? Go ahead. The baller move would have been if he'd said, I'm starting a Dow, and I'm the first $10 billion in to buy Twitter.

and I'm the first $10 billion in to buy Twitter. Because then he would have got $30 to $40 billion of it financed by dentists and Twitter evangelists. The Twitter Taliban would have funded this $1,000 or $10,000 at a time. And if he'd said, I'm the first $10 billion in, let's take Twitter to the moon and to the promised land of fake free speech. So many people are such big fans. They'd be like, oh, I'm partnering with Elon Musk. I'm putting in my $1,000.

And I started getting calls from all these dads asking me to speak to their sons, telling them not to do this. It's so funny. I just tweeted, Scott and I should do a DAO. Like, I was like, why don't we do a DAO? If the gas fees were lower. I mean, I'm not speaking out of school and I'm not trying to pretend I'm more important than I am. I have talked to several firms around this. If you

could figure out how to lower the gas fees, because the problem is if you don't get the organization, when you redistribute the money back to people, you can lose right now a dramatic amount. You pay a huge toll for setting this up once you decide not to do it. But if Musk had come in and said, I'm the first $10 billion into a Dow of $50 billion to take this company over, I think he could have raised the money from a couple hundred thousand of his 80 million fans, and then it would be serious. And not only that, it would have been technologically fascinating, and everyone would go, oh my God, he's such a fucking genius. And the crypto bros would have just literally started like masturbating in full sight.

They would have been so excited over this. And that would have been the baller move. Because here's the thing. The market in a hot minute recognizes what CNBC can't figure out in a day. He can't do this. He can't do this. This isn't a serious offer. All right.

But a Dow, we should do a Dow. I kept thinking, let's us do a Dow. We wouldn't attract the attention he would at all, but there you go. Who could we get? Who could we get to do? Mark Cuban. We could do it with Cuban. That would work.

I don't think Mark. I think Mark. No, I know, but I'm just trying to think who could. Mark wants to go to Mavericks games and work on pharmaceutical prices. But just who could do a Dow like that? There isn't another figure, right? Oh, I think there are. Who? I think anybody who's credible, who, if you brought together an operating group of talented media executives and people who actually seem to have some credibility and care about the Commonwealth, I think if you could lower the gas fees, I think a DAO would be very interesting here. The problem is at some point, at some point you want to let Parag and management actually

get on with the business. Yeah, because it hasn't been run by a full-time CEO for a very short amount of time, let's just say. Yeah, I think Jack has still got a huge following. He could do a DAO. I don't know if he's interested. And at some point, the shareholders of these companies go, hey, boss, you might want to stay focused over here. And you know what would happen? When the stock, if this became a reality and Tesla's stock was off 5% or 10%, all of a sudden, Tesla's shareholders would begin saying,

Elon, you don't love, you don't love, why don't you love us? Why don't you love your family, your first family? Yeah. I got to say, though, he still has a fan base that's really quite astonishing. I know we talked about this. Enormous. Enormous. Yeah, you're right. Jack could do it. Yeah, there's a couple of people who could do this. You're right. Anyway, it would be interesting. Anyway, never boring. Never boring, even if he's bored, is what my last line of my column was that's about to go up. All right, Scott, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about inflation and we'll take a question from a listener with an unusual profession.

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A little thing called inflation. The U.S. Department of Labor this week said that inflation is at a four-decade high or 8.5% year-over-year. Wow, that's a big number. It feels very 70s. U.S. stocks and government bonds yields dove on the news. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and its effects on oil market were at least partly to blame. And of course, COVID and supply chain disruptions did their part too. And then the inevitable coming out of this situation with COVID. How much inflation comes from corporate price gouging? Some people are alleging that because U.S. companies posted record profits, in part by raising their prices, including Tesla, by the way. From what I understand, it's up a couple thousand dollars, seven or eight thousand dollars. ExxonMobil and Chevron are both reaping record profits, their highest in seven years.

Exxon says it's going to use the money to start doing stock buybacks, which is good for them. Democrats in Congress are introducing a bill that would penalize companies that engage in price gouging. It'll go nowhere. The unemployment's low. The prices are up. Gas prices are down from where they were last month, I was just noticing. Labor market, full recovery. Unemployment, 3.6%. Productivity growth up. People are getting raises. So inflation, inflation, inflation, though. What do you think? from the right. It's just blather. I personally believe on the left, the blather is price gouging. If there's a hurricane in a city and Home Depot or Lowe's were to triple the price of lumber overnight, which by the way, they do not do, then that is price gouging. When you buy

up every bottle of Purell at the market and then try and sell it on eBay, okay. And by the way, one guy did that and he got tremendous- Yeah, that was a little more complex of a story, by the way, but go ahead. Well, I think that guy got shamed quite- Yes, he did. Yeah, Monica Lewinsky had him in a very good documentary. I actually felt for that guy. Price gouging, Exxon, Chevron, if you believe, Hermes is raising the price of handbags faster than inflation. Are they price gouging? I mean, first, one and two bedroom apartments across America are up 20% and 28%, respectively, year on year.

Does that mean every real estate owner is price gouging? Price gouging should be purged from the far left because it means they don't. Explicit price gouging, right? That's their right. You know what? That means they don't – Explicit price gouging, right? That's their right. You know what?

When gas prices were $1.50 a gallon, should the government have stepped in and subsidized oil companies, which quite frankly you could argue they do in this cronyist environment. But here's the thing. Companies – we live in a capitalist society that has – the fundamental around pricing are what the market will bear. And for about 15 years at Urban Outfitters and Panera, we haven't been able to raise prices. And now we can. And guess what? You know what we're going to do? Raise prices. And guess what? You know who's also price gouging us? CEOs. Well, let's stop them. Oh, no, they do it. You know who else is price gouging us right now? Frontline workers who want salaries up 40%. They're not price gouging us. So anyone who says price gouging-

We should price gouge someone. Who should we? Jim Bankoff. My point is, anyone who uses the term price gouging outside of a hurricane means they don't understand economics and they haven't bought into capitalism. I'm with you on this. I'm with you on this. Nonetheless, it's a big, you know, the Republicans are using inflation in a lot of the messaging and consumers are worried about it. Consumers are worried about the ability to buy a lot of the messaging, and consumers are worried about it. Consumers are worried about the ability to buy things. And the supplies, you look at baby food, a baby formula, it's hard to find. As someone who has a baby, it's really hard to find, and it's much more expensive.

And so there's a lot of, like, in your little life, you do notice it quite a bit. And you blame who? You blame Biden, presumably, or whoever's in government. Yeah, look, we are, the reason why, I mean, we should also purge the word transitory. At this point, inflation is not transitory. It is, to some extent, here. And it's been the perfect storm of bad things where an invasion has sent commodities skyrocketing. But the reason why I think, I think, unless the psychology steps in where people just start buying things because they're worried they're going to be more expensive the next

day, and I don't think you see that. I think why I'm, first off, a couple of things. Anytime you have the Fed aggressively raise interest rates, it creates a recessionary environment. And I'm not sure that's going to be any different here. But recession is not the worst thing in the world. The in. We're in kind of the optimal position. One, we're energy dependent. Look at Germany wringing their hands. Do you realize right now Europe is funding the war effort in Russia? We don't have to buy Russian coal and oil. We are a net exporter of energy. We are also food independent. net exporter of energy. We are also food independent. So, we don't, we're not like an African nation that's like, shit, 10% of GDP this year is going to go to buying basic staples. Yeah, inflation in other countries is also high. This is not a Biden thing. We're actually as well positioned to endure these spikes as anybody. I don't, you know, the yield curve was inverted. It's de-inverted, meaning people believe that it's a problem in the short term, not in the long term. It looks like we're going into recession.

The interesting thing here is that consumer sentiment is negative right now. And every time you have consumer sentiment at the level it's at right now, it means one of two things. Either we're already in a recession or a recession is coming. Because at the end of the day, this is more about animal spirits. If people start feeling insecure. But when Jerome Powell starts taking interest rates up 50 bips at a time, that's just going to cool the economy. And that's what they're supposed to do.

All right. So speaking of supply chain woes, there's more trouble with truckers. This time in Texas, they're not being nice to truckers. Truckers entering from Mexico are facing long lines due to an inspection policy from Texas governor, Greg Abbott. I think this is an unforced error, although some people say he's doing it to raise prices

to make Biden look worse. The governor doubled inspections of incoming cargo after the Biden administration lifted a policy that turned away asylum seekers. I don't know what to make. I think it's an unforced error and his party looks like an idiot. And Biden people are pushing back rather significantly. And so is Beto, if you noticed,

he was tweeting away on it. I think he was over-tweeting, but nonetheless, why not take advantage of something that has great visuals of trucks, you know, not being able to get in and your avocados spoiling and all your produce spoiling. And so I don't know what's going to happen here, but I think he probably has to let these trucks in because he'll get blamed. The one thing Republicans do is point to Biden for supply chain issues or inflation issues. This sort of pins it a little bit on the Republicans.

So I don't know. Anytime I see a story about truckers, I empathize with Travis Kalanick when he said the problem is sitting in the front of the seat. Stop, don't you dare. They're going to come around your house and like beep. Look, I don't think trucking is what I'd call a rewarding career for people. And I think whenever you have technology disrupt an industry like what I believe is going to happen in trucking, I think you as a society have to make an investment in retraining and recognize that there are people on the bad side of disruption.

I was in Brazil and I gave a speech at Vitex, and just so I can brag, 11,000 people. And the question is, what would be your piece of advice to Brazil? Brazil is about to experience the perfect storm of good things, commodity prices surging, SoftBank and Tiger coming in with capital, an entrepreneurial society, a young workforce. But here's the thing. They need to learn from us. And that is prosperity doesn't necessarily translate into progress. And we continue to have these incredible unlocks around globalization, digitization. But we don't want to invest or reinvest or take care of the people it leaves behind. And to be honest, or not to be honest, I think autonomous driving, I think the place it goes is trucking because they can drive it midnight.

Well, I think he's more concerned with asylum seekers in these trucks, right? This is just all, you know, co-splaying on political issues. They need to build a wall to keep immigrants in. We have net negative migration. It's still a big issue with people who live down there. I know a lot of people, even people who I find very reasonable. This goes back and forth in such a ridiculously uncomplex way that it's exhausting on both sides, I have to say. This all goes back to the Gang of Five and who is one of the weakest senators of the last 20 years. And that is Senator Rubio is this hot, young, good-looking junior

senator was put on the Gang of Five and asked to come up with immigration reform. It was a bipartisan group of senators. They had a real shot at this. And he started posing for the crazy right and withdrew from it because he wouldn't agree to a path to asylum. We have used the most flexible, economic, agile workforce in the history of our economy. And that is the 10, 20, 30 million good people who risked their lives and took us seriously when we winked at them and said, you can come over as long as you wipe grandma's ass and pick our grapes and serve our food for below market and let us maintain our quality of living. And then we decided to demonize them. And this is not only immoral, it's economically stupid. Oh, you've got a lot of economic ideas today.

You've got a lot of very strong economic ideas. Our quality of life. So many middle class and upper income people, they talk about us taking our jobs. They take the jobs we don't want for less money than we'd have to pay domestic workers. And even now, our unemployment rate is low. It's really, you know, they were closing so many stores,

whether it's airlines or stores, they close on a certain day because they can't get people. Combination of low unemployment and immigration issues. I'm especially profane today. I wonder if it's because I worked out and I'm sweating. Yeah, I see that. No more sweating. Anyway, it's an interesting situation.

We'll see where we go with inflation. What do you think? I'm blathering on. I just let you blather. I think price gouging is kind of a ridiculous thing to keep focusing on. I do think people are concerned about inflation. And it's a very important political issue that you have to address and not act like it's a transitory thing because people have real pain. And I think Greg Abbott did an unforced error, someone who never makes sports

metaphors. They were doing good making it look like this is not going to win anything. These pictures are fantastic for Democrats of people waiting to get in over. I don't think people stick to their guns if their fruit's more expensive. And again, it's the same thing. If anything's more expensive, no matter how you feel about immigration or whatever, you tend to be like, why am I paying this much for my whatever produce comes from Mexico? Anyway, we'll see. Again, things are more complex. All these governors, Kara, are trying to out-crazy each other.

They're all trying to say to a 60-year-old white evangelical voter with a straw in Iowa, hey, no, I'm crazier. No, wait, I'm crazier. Yeah, the stuff around trans and gay people are the worst, obviously. You know, the one who's the best at this, I don't know what DeSantis is going to do to one-up Greg Abbott, but we'll see what he's going to do. Who knows? Is he what Rick Scott said? No, what did I say? My senior senator. So, the junior senator, the spineless senator who could have played a real important role in actual immigration reform, but decided he wanted to, you know, had to cater to the crazies because he was going to run for president the next four cycles. Rick Scott, our junior senator,

has put in place a bill that would remove all federal programs and we'd have to stop Medicare, stop Social Security, cut the IRS funding in half. This is a guy where men and women with guns and badges showed up because he had committed as CEO

the greatest Medicare fraud in history. But now he wants to get rid of the IRS and wants to get rid of all federal programs unless they're voted back in. Can you imagine what a disaster that would be for CNN? He's an idiot. I think he's never going to be president. This guy's never – same thing with Rubio. I wouldn't say the same of DeSantis. I think he's got a native political –

DeSantis right now looks like the Republican nominee. That's my bet. Yeah, I think so. But again, these folks on the right, and this is the problem. This is such a threat to our society. And not only on the left with these ridiculous offers like proposals like the Green New Deal that just make us seem so out of touch. Is that the whole world has become the only way you get elected is by appealing to the crazy on the crazy left or the crazy right. Anyway, I don't think this is just part of that. I don't think that's how you get

elected. But nonetheless, anyway, let's- What moderates are getting elected, Kara? Well, I think there's going to be, I have a whole theory about the exhausted middle. There's a lot of us. The silent majority? The exhausted middle? I do. Would you consider yourself part of the exhausted middle? Compared to right now, yeah. Yeah. I mean, compared to the right wing, I'm screaming liberal. But they've gone off the deep end. So I look a lot more reasonable than others.

You're more what I call, you're more of a capitalist than I think people give you credit for. I think you understand the importance of making sure the engine kind of hums, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. I had an argument with a DeSantis person about that. They're like, you, blah, blah, woke about leaving Florida when we did the pivot. And I was like, I'm a capitalist. Are you a communist? I can't do what I want as a business person. And then they want laws. I was like, or you are a socialist. I don't know. I can't tell, but I should be able to do what I want with my money. No, you're not a socialist. You're performative, and I am too, because I don't know if this will actually make any difference, but we're not socialists. We're not. I want people to get the fuck out of my house. Anyway, let's pivot to a listener question. This one came via email. I'll read it.

You've got, you've got, I can't believe I'm going to be a mailman. You've got mail. Just a note on the recent Facebook scandal about placing op-eds and letters to the editor about TikTok. Hundreds of companies, especially tech, do indeed do this. We know this. Usually the way that is much worse than this example. Here, Facebook is trying to smear another company. In most cases, these AstroTurf campaigns are used to influence public policy. It's lobbying by any other name, and it's completely unregulated, unreported, and under the radar. Sincerely, someone who used to do this for a living. We're aware. We're aware, sir. Someone who used to do this. That's a nice name, someone who used to do this for a living, but we're aware. We don't have to like it. I mean, you got to look at the impact. It's one thing if, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of competitors, including traditional media companies, hire lobbyists to create hyperbole around the damage that Facebook is doing.

And sometimes unfairly. They say, okay, they make them out to be, or certain instances, more evil than they were being in that instance. Sometimes they're actually, you know, for example, I think social media has done the right thing or tried to do the right thing around Ukraine. And so, I don't think every situation, I think in every situation, there's a group of people and lobbyists who will try and position Facebook as the evil empire. Now, in this instance, what is so just distasteful and kind of bridges from amoral to immoral is it didn't take a lot of critical thinking to go, okay, do we really want school boards all over the nation to begin assembling and taking their valuable time and resources to

try and address the story of the assaultault Your Teacher challenge that we believe is credible because media outlets have been running it, and it ends up it's not credible, and that one of the primary forces driving this false flag, this false story, is their rival Facebook. I mean, that kind of crosses a line. That's my sense. What do you think? No, I think others have done it. I think he's correct.

But it's still not. It's like saying, you know, people really take a dump and these people just pee. It's just disgusting no matter what it is. And so it's also let's try to compete on quality. And I get why you would try to undercut that. You know, Uber did it. You know, it's not uncommon. It's not uncommon that people try to undercut the, you know, Uber did it. Every, you know, it's not uncommon. It's not uncommon that people try to do it to Apple.

Apple tries to do it to others. There's always a constant lobbying campaign going on almost continually because it's one tool in the arsenal. In this case, it seemed, and even though Facebook is claiming it's a rogue person, it's distasteful. It's just, because on the face of it, instead of competing to be better,

they are, you know, that's always my inclination, but I'm not surprised people do this. And it is unregulated, unreported. How could you regulate it? How could you regulate people lying about other people? They do it all the time personally. You know, rumors, you know, I, you know, you've been subject to rumors. I've been subject to, you know, like I had someone call me, they're like, oh, someone's saying this about you. I'm like, it's not true. I don't know what to tell you. There's like, there must be a reason, whatever. And so, I think it's, you know, it's human nature to do this. I just look, we talked about shame. It's trying to find shame in things. It's never going away. I really want to encourage Facebook to continue to go all in on the Oculus.

I just think that is a great idea. Please double that. That is such a good move. You're so mean to the Oculus. It's not a bad product. It's a very good product. This is literally the K-Car meets the Newton meets Quibi. Newton wasn't as good as Oculus.

Again, I hope it's the same people that worked on Libra or Diem or Portal. I love the idea of these thousands of people just literally wasting their life. Oh, don't be mean. It's a much better product than all this. The thing is already dead, Cara. It's already dead. All right. Okay. But people try different things all the time.

For example, CNN, for example. You know, everyone tries something. Oh, that's a low blow. Have you seen Jake Tapper's book club? Take that back. Take that back. No, I will not. Oh, my God.

I'm just saying I like it. I support innovation. By the way, Salon Magazine said I'm the best original content on CNN+. Thank you very much, Salon. Well, that is true. I would agree with that. I would agree with that. That was a passive-aggressive compliment, Simone. Well, that is true. I would agree with that. I would agree with that. That was a passive aggressive compliment. I would agree with that.

Yes, I would agree with that. I think you're fresh. I think you're fresh. I think you're fresh in general and in a negative way, but I also think I like your stuff. It's the only stuff I'm watching on there, I'll be honest with you. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. As much as I like, I think the other stuff is quite well done. More importantly, have your sons watched it? Have your sons

watched me? I'm desperate for their affirmation. Oh, you know what? I'll get them to do it. They like listening to you. Alex has been listening to Pivot a lot lately, which he was. And he said he got, I didn't see him for a little bit because I was in California. When are you guys coming back down to Casa de Dogs? We should. We should.

But it's hot now, right? It's real hot. It's starting to get hot. It's still really nice down here. April's actually a really nice month. Let me think about it. I got to figure out when we, if we were a very busy family, as you know, with all the children. Yeah, well, we'll sit with bated breath. So let us know. Okay, scramble the jets.

We'll come down for a weekend. We'll come down. We'll come down. You could come up here. It would be really nice. You can come up for the White House Correspondents Dinner, which might be canceled. I have to get invited to that. I have to get invited to that.

Yeah. Although. You and I could go as a media entity. Francis Haugen wanted to go with us. Should we go and make out? That'd cause some. No, no, no. Oh, God. No.

Okay. That was interesting. Send us your questions and confessions. Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 855-51-PIVOT. All right, Scott, one more quick break. Try to clean yourself up. We'll be back for wins and fails. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to

free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Okay, Scott, give us this week's wins and fails. What up? So I got to be honest, I'm a little triggered by all of this and I haven't been focused,

but I'm just real straight and real quick, some wins and fails. I think that there was a win. I think, I don't know if it's the health commissioner in Philadelphia. They instituted, they reinstituted a mask mandate for indoors. And I want to be clear. Yeah, they did. My son mentioned that this morning. I think Florida has mostly gotten it right. And that is, I want to give Florida leadership credit.

And I was very critical. I do think that, I don't want to say we on the left, but a lot of people said, had a lack of nuance in the argument that, okay, you sequester seniors to give people access to vaccines, but there is a trade-off and a real cost to extreme lockdowns. I think that that argument, I think it's important when the data changes to change your mind. I think that argument has more credibility than I gave it. And I want to acknowledge that. At the same time, I think the city of Philadelphia has made a very unpopular decision, and that is what government is supposed to do. It's supposed to look at the data and prevent a tragedy of the commons and think long-term. And I'm not even saying I agree with the decision.

What I'm saying is government needs to do what they think is best for the people, regardless of the political fallout. And I think that they really showed leadership here because I thought they must be getting so much shit from an exhausted populace around that decision. But I thought that's what government is supposed to do. They're supposed to think long-term for us. So my win is what I think is a leadership move by government in Philadelphia. My loss, and you and I spoke about this a few days ago, my fail, if you will, is Barack Obama, President Obama.

And that is, I think there are a few individuals in the world that have a more credible voice and are more needed at this moment. And I want to be clear, I think he's earned this right, but I think he's mostly hanging out on David Geffen's boat and making millions of dollars and enjoying life. And I think he deserves it, but I think the Commonwealth needs his voice right now on a variety of issues. And so I think the fail, or let me put it, the invitation of trying to position this as a positive, I think President Obama is someone who commands the space he occupies, is young, is thoughtful, has credibility with centrists and people on the right. So he should get more serious, right? I think he needs to look at some of these issues and weigh in here.

And not only that, I think he's also good at telling the far left to calm the fuck down. You're not being realistic around this. I think he has credibility. He's one of the few people in the world right now that both the left and the right will listen to. Come back. We need you. It was reported that I had lunch with him recently. And this is true. And it was off the record lunch. But one of the things I think I got the impression, and again, he didn't say this, that it's very hard to be an ex-president and weigh in on things. You know, George Bush just paints and says lovely things now and doesn't really.

So I think he doesn't. I think he's probably worried about hurting or overshadowing Biden. That was my, he did not say this, but it's my impression that you have to be very careful when he could cause more trouble than benefit. And now that he has such a great brand to weigh into it, risk that right now. He has such, he left the stage while everyone was applauding. And to get back on the stage is a lot of risk. Right, but I think he's concerned about not stepping on Joe Biden. I think that is a big concern of his. And I think that's probably pretty smart. But I do agree he could be a little more serious about some issues, which is, I think, important for someone like him.

Because it's very hard to be – these presidents are all young, right? And so what do you do? Except write a book, take that money, do speeches, take that money. Like, it's really hard because a lot of these presidents are not necessarily older. Some of them are old. In any case, we'll see what happens there. I don't know. I don't have a win and a fail. I think that obviously the Ukraine situation, which I hope does not come out of the news, the things they're discovering, the comment that Biden made on genocide, it was sort of over his skis, but I kind of appreciated him saying it. I mean, I think he sometimes says things that are pretty true and then gets a lot of crap for not being

diplomatic. But I think what's happening in Russia, including the disinformation campaigns among people there, there was a very devastating story in the Washington Post about how people really have decided Ukrainians are less than human and that's what they're using as an excuse to kill them and wipe them off the face of the earth. So the continued heroism in Ukraine and the fails, obviously, the Russian people who just really have got this one wrong. And I think they have been fully propagandized so that they believe what they're doing is right. And I'm so sorry for them that this has happened for them.

And I find it reprehensible that they're not picking their heads up and seeing what's happening. They're seeing, as I often say, they're seeing what they believe. They're not believing what they see. And of course, they don't get to see it. In any case, they've been fully propagandized. One thing I just want to note about the Twitter thing. But in any case, they've been fully propagandized. One thing I just want to note about the Twitter thing,

Twitter has Goldman Sachs, the New York Times is reporting, has Goldman Sachs to help fend off Musk. Its CFO, Ned Siegel, who I like quite a bit, was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. They've been a longstanding relationship. And I suspect that the Securities Exchange Commission will probably weigh in here at some point if they're actually paying attention.

But this is going to be an interesting thing. Again, the Times is also reading, how does he pay for this? And I think that's going to be hard. It's going to be hard. Well, as we sit here, Kara, as I am like a bored dude sitting in his parents' basement,

vaping and checking his stocks all the time for no real reason. Twitter is flat. An announcement to buy the firm for 54 bucks a share. Market's yawning. Market's like not a serious offer. They're not like vomiting, but they're definitely yawning.

Just to read Musk's statement, I invested in Twitter as I believe its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe. And I believe free speech is a societal imperative of functioning democracy. Since making the investment, I speech around the globe. And I believe free speech is a societal imperative of functioning democracy. Since making the investment, I now realize the company will neither thrive or serve this societal imperative in its current form.

Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company. That may be true, but this is a little- I'll make a bet. If the deal goes through- Much. I was listening to CNBC this morning, and they had an analyst on saying, yeah, this is a fait accompli. The deal's going through. The board has to take it. And they're all nodding their heads. If the deal goes through, I'll go out for a steak dinner with Joe Kiernan and ask his views on the pandemic and act interested and nod my head.

Oh, no. You're screwed. And if it doesn't go through, I get to roll with Andrew Ross Sorkin. We're friends. We're good, good friends. And Sarah Eisen, who I think, I think she and I should be friends.

I get the feeling. I don't think you're friends with any of these people. I'm friends with Andrew. You know that. That hurts my feelings. Sure, sure. You know what I'm doing tonight? I'm having a dinner party for Ben Smith here in Washington.

We'll smell you. That's pretty compelling content. He is a friend. That literally, that makes CNN Plus feel compelling. I'm going to get shit for that comment. Yeah, yeah, you will. That's okay. It's funny. You can make fun. You know what, Scott? You be you. I have no choice at this age.

All right. As Elon Musk just said, I have moved straight to the end. No more back and forth. This has been a great show. That's what he said about his Twitter bit. He's moved straight to the end. Because of you. Do you know you? I want to say thank you because I was thinking of you. That interview, actually, the interview you did with the woman on shaming. Yeah. I thought that was so outstanding. I think you're an outstanding interviewer. It made me feel insecure because I think our interviews go down in quality when you have to ask me to ask a couple questions.

Oh, no, you're very good. It's not true. And also, you know what you do, Cara? You know what you do? What do I do? And the only person that's on the same level as you is Michael Smirconish. The two of you set people up for success better than anyone I know. And that is you know when to push back.

You know how to pull out their views in a thoughtful way. That is a real skill. Thank you. Thank you. I like Kathy a lot, Kathy O'Neill. She's really great. I would recommend you listen to my Elon interview from September, which was interesting. Yeah, I'm going to do that right away.

And then I'm going to go get a colonoscopy without anesthetic. I'm trying to get him to talk again. He hasn't gotten back to me. I think he's busy with Walt. Walt, by the way, you know who's the winner here? I have a win. Who? Walter Isaacson, who was with Elon during this whole period. He's writing a book. It's pretty well known on Elon. And he's right there. Come on. I don't care. Does he really? Can't he wait till he's dead? No. Can't he wait till he's dead? Oh, you know what?

I'm trying to say I would love to be him right now because he gets this, he gets front row seat to the circus. And it's a fascinating circus. In any case, that's the show. Speaking of circuses, we'll be back on Tuesday with more Pivot unless Elon Musk buys us. That would be fun. I don't know. That'll be good. That'd be good. And then he'll make you eat lunch Elon Musk buys us. That would be fun. I don't know. That'll be good. That'd be good. And then he'll make you eat lunch with him every day. That'll be fantastic. Before he has you disappeared, as they say. Scott, read us out.

Today's show was produced by Lara Naiman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Interdot engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miel Silverio. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for to Drew Burrows and Neil Silverio. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Box Media. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business. Oh my gosh, Kara, may we live in interesting times. We do. You and I are going to space. You and I are making out at the White House Correspondents'

We are not making out. That's right. Surrender to the dog. No, I shall not.