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

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Speaker 12 hi everyone this is pivot from new york magazine and the vox media podcast network i'm kara swisher and i'm scott galloway scott where are you now you're somewhere else um i'll give you a hint i'm drinking a tiger beer actually that's not much of a hint

Speaker 13 I'm somewhere off the southwest coast of India. I'm in the Maldives.

Speaker 12 Maldives, very nice. What is it?

Speaker 12 This is like a geographic thing.

Speaker 12 You're just hop scotching across the globe, correct? Is that what's happening?

Speaker 13 You know, Kara, I'm going to be dead soon. And I finally have some economic security, and I want to literally devour life and do a bunch of crazy shit.

Speaker 13 I only have my kids for a few more years, so I'm yes to pretty much anything.

Speaker 12 Oh, cool.

Speaker 12 Is there a date that you're dying that I could be

Speaker 12 dialed in on?

Speaker 13 Sooner than I'd like. But I mean, if you think about how fast I get a lot of strength and perspective from my atheism, I think this is, I don't think this is a dress rehearsal.

Speaker 13 So while I'm still modestly healthy and have a bunch of people I enjoy spending time with, and I'm blessed with resources, and I don't, I don't take that for granted.

Speaker 13 And I like to think that I recognize my blessings. But yeah, I'm, you want to go to the Maldives? I'm a yes.

Speaker 12 Okay. All right.
Well, that's good. You know, we never talk about religion.
It's interesting. I'm agnostic, actually.

Speaker 12 And honestly, I do feel the pull of having been, you know, raised Catholic Catholic of religion.

Speaker 12 I don't, I don't, I don't get pulled in by it, but I do definitely feel differently than you about that issue.

Speaker 13 Yeah, you've always, you've always talked about, I mean, I joke that atheists or agnostics are just closeted atheists. I think there's more atheists out there than people think

Speaker 13 because it's somehow seen as a negative. You're seen as less,

Speaker 13 not only less spiritual, but less holy and less righteous if you don't believe in a Superman.

Speaker 13 And I think about this a lot because my kids have had absolutely no exposure to religion. And I think they've probably lost something because I was exposed to a lot of different religions.

Speaker 13 I know you were exposed to religion. And I think that I do think religion gets the highlights of religion, the highlight reel on religion right now is pretty negative, right?

Speaker 13 It's kind of central to, you know, when you have good people do good things, bad people do bad things, but when you have good people doing a lot of really hideous things, usually religion is involved.

Speaker 13 And so it gets a lot, I think it has a bad brand right now. But my experience, and I think yours, and I'll ask you if you have the same experience, I won't put words in your mouth, but

Speaker 13 I was exposed to, I went to temple, I went to church, I went to Presbyterian treatment. When your dad's married four times, you go to a lot of different religious institutions.

Speaker 13 And it was a positive in my life. And I never bought into the lineage.
I never bought that there was an invisible friend in the room with us.

Speaker 13 But on the whole, it was just a bunch of good people trying to share something and feel connected. I found they were very patriotic, wanted to help each other.

Speaker 13 And I have some people in my life religion, religion plays a really positive role.

Speaker 12 Well, like a lot of things, the best of it is terrific. The worst of it is absolutely the worst.

Speaker 12 You know, if Invisible Friend, there's a new movie coming out, Ryan Reynolds is doing called If, which is about actual invisible friends that kids have.

Speaker 12 But I don't think it's a super being thing that I have. It's just that it can't, I just, I do feel energy.

Speaker 12 I know I'm not sounding like a California person, but I've been to places where I have felt something. You know what I mean? And it may be myself.
It may be,

Speaker 12 I do feel a pull to it. And I don't know why that is.
And I don't explore it at all.

Speaker 12 I'm not interested in exploring because the hatefulness of so many religions towards gay people or women or, you know what I mean? I just can't do it.

Speaker 12 But I certainly have hopes that there's something beyond us.

Speaker 12 I guess that's why I'm a real agnostic. I really am.
I don't know. I didn't expose my kids to religion at all.

Speaker 12 We went to a lot of different synagogues and Unitarian stuff, but we never pressed it.

Speaker 12 And they're certainly not faithful in any way that in that regard, as I was, as I was, because my grandmother and stuff. Anyway, it's interesting.
It's interesting when you think about it.

Speaker 12 Actually, it leads into what we're going to talk about in a minute, which is the Super Bowl ads. There was a Jesus one that I actually liked quite a bit.
And I was talking about.

Speaker 13 I was wondering how we were going to do that segue.

Speaker 12 I know, but there was. It was.
It was actually, when it came on at first, my wife is Jewish. She was like, oh, no, the Jesus one.

Speaker 12 And there was also one that was, there was a bunch of controversial ones, but

Speaker 12 that one I thought was well done. It was about Jesus washing feet.
And I thought thought it was a very, I love all the stories of Jesus. I really do.
I really do. I think they're wonderful.

Speaker 12 Love the core.

Speaker 13 That's a good place to start.

Speaker 12 Love the core.

Speaker 13 Do on to your neighbors. You're doing

Speaker 12 a lot of good lessons in there. Yeah, there are.
So that's what I liked. I thought they did that really well.

Speaker 12 Anyway, we've got a lot to talk about today, including the Super Bowl, including a debate over Biden's mental fitness after a special counsel report, Disney's big move in the world of gaming, big deal.

Speaker 12 Plus, we'll talk with two friends of Pivot, platformer Zoe Schiffer and Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner, who have new books out about Elon musk and twitter who just tweeted a boob joke which okay fine but let's talk about a taylor swift's game i heard her boyfriend won the super bowl that that was a hillary clinton joke actually who put it up a lot of people are enjoying tweeting and stuff like that and not just tweeting but threading and putting instagram and things like that social media is at its best at fun things like this the kansas city chiefs beat the san francisco 49ers 25 to 22.

Speaker 12 i felt bad because i'm from san francisco but i still was happy taylor swift's boyfriend won it was a very close game Both teams played incredibly well.

Speaker 12 At the last minute, Patrick Mahome really did push it out, like really showed more energy and stuff. But that Brock Purdy was amazing.

Speaker 13 I think he was the last player drafted the draft. They call him Mr.
Irrelevant. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Nice story. He was.
It was great.

Speaker 12 Nobody played badly. It was a great game.

Speaker 12 Taylor created a brand value of more than $330 million for the Chiefs in the NFL, according to data from Apex Marketing Group.

Speaker 12 She was chugging beers. She was slamming beers.
She wasn't just chugging.

Speaker 12 She was slamming them with Blake Lively and Ice Spice, which was very funny to watch, but they didn't pull away to her too much. And she was quite respectful at the end.

Speaker 12 When he came out after he gave a crazy speech,

Speaker 12 he was like, ah, like he had the sort of screamy, you know, fantastic speech at the end.

Speaker 12 She was very deferential to the mother, which I kind of liked as a mother. I was like, if my son won the super, he hugs me fucking first before the billionaire famous person behind me.

Speaker 12 And she did that well. But it was was a good game.
Tech was well represented. Elon Musk was there.
Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey, for some reason, was they kept saying Beyonce and Jay-Z and some guy.

Speaker 12 And he was wearing a Satoshi thing. He was there.
He obviously works a title with them.

Speaker 12 This year's Super Bowl ads cost $7 million per 30 seconds, with female NFL viewership increasing 11% between July and December because of Taylor Shift.

Speaker 12 I think more women-centric brands like NYX Cosmetics and Sara V, which very funny ads, appeared in the Super Bowl commercials.

Speaker 12 Michael Sarah, just is very funny in these ads. And of course, President Biden released a video on social surrounding the Super Bowl.
He's gotten onto TikTok.

Speaker 12 He criticized food companies for shrinkflation, calling it a ripoff. But he also had a really funny TikTok ad about his choice as game or

Speaker 12 halftime. It was good.

Speaker 12 They're quite good on social media.

Speaker 12 The person running Biden's social media is really good, and the TikTok stuff looks like a good start. So it was all over, I think, a positive.
It was sort of like the Grammys, quite good.

Speaker 12 What do you think? And do you have a favorite ad? I'll talk about mine in a minute, but love your thoughts.

Speaker 13 You know, I didn't see the ads. I had to wake up at 7 a.m.
here to

Speaker 13 see the fourth quarter. And I woke my boys up, and

Speaker 13 we then watched the

Speaker 13 replay where you just see the plays. I mean, you can watch the whole game in like 30 minutes if you just see the plays.

Speaker 13 I didn't see the ads.

Speaker 13 I think Taylor Swift showed up and a game broke out. I think Taylor Swift is the story here.
And whether you're sick of hearing about it or you think it's hurt the game, which it is not,

Speaker 13 she did what diaper changing tables and bathrooms could not do. She did what having Janet Jackson and female performers could not do.

Speaker 13 She increased female viewership and increased the value of every sports franchise in the NFL, probably by 10 or 20% by virtue of this

Speaker 13 romance, which by all, I mean, through all angles in my viewpoint, feels like a very healthy, loving supportive

Speaker 13 you know great romance and anytime you see a positive positive role models for dating like i think it's wonderful

Speaker 13 and so

Speaker 13 he dresses so well did you see that outfit he had on yeah he's they're both they're both lovely people and she's a phenomenon and she has increased economic value of these things so i think it's you know it was all about her that the other thing that got less reporting that's the downside to this is that now that sports betting is legal get this 26 of america bet on the super bowl in addition of all the addictions gambling has the highest suicide rate because if you're addicted to alcohol or meth or cocaine people notice and will try and intervene and sometimes they're successful and sometimes they're not but oftentimes they are You can mortgage your house, spend your kids' tuition money,

Speaker 13 you know, lose everything and nobody around you has no idea and you feel as if there's no way out except one way out so you know i'm worried about this yeah well wild way to bring it down scott but yes you're right taylor swift

Speaker 12 i would agree i think yeah we have to get our arms around gambling i would agree i think it's something that said something like the super bowl i guess you're not going to avoid it it was happening behind the scenes anyway uh in front of the scenes is i'd rather have it there so we're aware of it you know there's always been betting at every sporting event especially this one.

Speaker 13 The border of America.

Speaker 12 I know, I get it, but I suspect it was pretty high before.

Speaker 12 We didn't see it.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 I don't want to totally infantilize people. I think people, if you can go, if you can raise your hand and go and fight for your country or

Speaker 13 decide to drink yourself to death, I think you should be able to gamble. But I think we need more financial literacy.

Speaker 13 in high schools that teaches people about basics of financial literacy, especially among young men.

Speaker 13 explain to them biology and neurobiology, and that they are more pre-wired to be prone to risk-aggressive behavior, including gambling.

Speaker 13 I mean, even there's a, there's a, there's an adjacent story here about the stock market.

Speaker 13 There's $3.5 trillion in transactions in the markets every year, in the NASDAQ and the NYSC, and about $300 billion of it is IPOs and secondary offerings, which is what the markets are supposed to exist for.

Speaker 13 The markets are basically supposed to be there to raise capital for companies so they could grow.

Speaker 13 So about 80, 90% of transactions in the stock market are really really just speculation, which is a fancy word for gambling. Gambling is a real issue.
And

Speaker 13 I'm not going to infantilize men. They should be able to do what they want, but they need to be made aware of these risks.

Speaker 13 And my fear is that there's a lot of young men who think that trading fucking Solano is somehow investing. It's not.
It's gambling. And gambling is a lot of fun.
I love it. I do it a lot.

Speaker 13 I think it's a ton of fun, but it's consumption. And 90% of people who do it are going to lose everything.

Speaker 13 And I don't think they're taught that at an early enough age.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I would agree. Okay, Bummer.
I'm going to talk about the ads because they were so good. Speaking of selling a shit,

Speaker 13 I hijacked the conversation.

Speaker 12 I have always,

Speaker 12 ads have not been as good in the past recently, but these ads, spectacular. Really? What's your favorite? Oh, my God.
All of them.

Speaker 12 The Dunkin' Donuts one with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and J-Lo and Tom Brady, hysterical. Dunkings.
Go see it. It's called Dunk Kings.
And

Speaker 12 Ben Affleck allowed himself to be seemed feckless. And J-Lo's looks were fantastic.
And stupid little things, like she had a diamond-encrusted Dunkin' Donuts thing.

Speaker 12 I thought it was brilliant and funny. They're all brilliant and funny, all of them.
The Beyoncé ad for Verizon, where she's trying to break the internet, was she never jokes and she joked.

Speaker 12 It was, and they had the guy from

Speaker 12 Veep, who was wonderful, really funny, really making fun of herself about lemonade and

Speaker 12 everything. It just was, it made it, it, she made fun of herself in a really fantastic, funny, witty way.

Speaker 12 I thought where Jason Momoa was with the guys from Scrubs and they did a flash dance thing was hysterically funny. I didn't know Jason Momoa could sing.

Speaker 12 And at the end, a friend of mine, Jennifer Beals, is there. I was hoping she would be and she was.
And they did it exactly perfectly.

Speaker 12 Just there was a lot. They're all good.

Speaker 12 I didn't see one I didn't think was clever. But that was T-Mobile.
That was T-Mobile. Yeah, that was a T-Mobile ad.
That was really, really good.

Speaker 13 What about, I just read about the ones of the guy who's angry at the self-driving technology at Tesla.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah, he put that in again. I like that.

Speaker 12 It was a bad ad. I was like, can't you make it better?

Speaker 12 But it was a bad ad. He just, he did that last year, I think.

Speaker 13 Strange, no? I think it's strange.

Speaker 12 I guess, whatever.

Speaker 13 Got the money. Have fun.

Speaker 12 Yeah, exactly. And there was a controversy over the RFK ad, and now he just apologized for it because a PAC that was affiliated with it was using, was trying to copy an ad by his uncle,

Speaker 12 JFK, obviously, and he had to apologize. It was terrible.

Speaker 12 I think

Speaker 12 a Trump supporter is the one who paid for it because they're trying to fuck with Biden in that regard. And boy, was the reaction.

Speaker 12 He never apologizes because he's such a fatuous Pop and J, but he did, like, using the memory. And they're all like, get the fuck off of JFK's lawn right now,

Speaker 12 which was interesting. But they were all creative.
I thought they were, I don't think there was a real loser. And there used to be a lot of losers.

Speaker 12 I thought they were all pretty, if they're spending that much money they had creative people doing it i thought they were good i thought they were fun and enjoyable you should watch them all with your kids because they're funny the flash dance one is very funny the only one i saw on youtube was i saw the one with jennifer anderson about forgetting forgetting stuff and she seems to give a tremor yeah that's right it's fun it's fun anyway um it was uh it was good it was good it was a great super bowl very similar to the grammys highly enjoyable live television broadcast right so i think it was probably a win for cbs um they of course sounds like it was a win all around.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think they previewed a bunch of their shows, which look, they did a nice job. They previewed, they pushed the NFL very nicely.

Speaker 12 There was several NFL ads that were good too, um, that were funny. And uh, it's, it was, it felt, I know it sounds dumb, but it felt very Taylor Swifty.
It was great entertainment, great fun.

Speaker 12 Everyone's having fun, except the right wing is losing its fucking mind. And I have to say, the very best, Joe Biden had the best tweet.

Speaker 12 It was, he, he tweeted right after a picture of him as a dark Joe Biden with the eyes, with the laser eyes. And he just wrote, just like we drew it up.

Speaker 12 So he's playing into the conspiracy theories around that this was planned by the CIA, the Taylor Swift win and this and that. If they did,

Speaker 12 they'd have Travis Kelsey have the last carry for the touchdown, FYI.

Speaker 12 But there's, you know, all these conspiracy theories around her that he was going to propose to her or back Biden in the middle of it. And I thought Joe Biden took advantage of it beautifully.

Speaker 12 Just like we drew it up. Like, you fuckers, we didn't make, you know, this wasn't a conspiracy theory for the CIA to hurt Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 And then the person who had the worst social media, I think, was Donald Trump himself taking credit for Taylor Swift's success and trying to kiss up to her.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he did a tweet where, or a truth, where he said, he goes, I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and other musical artists.

Speaker 12 Joe Biden didn't do anything for Taylor and never will. There's no way she could endorse crooked Joe Biden, which she's done before, by the way.

Speaker 12 The worst and most corrupt president in the history of our country, be it disloyal to a man who made her so much money.

Speaker 12 Besides that, I like her boyfriend, Travis, even though he may be liberal and probably can't stand me. Are you fucking? He didn't do anything about so full of lies and taking credit for her.

Speaker 12 And what I wrote is taking undeserved credit for her enormous success is classic and heinous.

Speaker 12 But it reads as if he's stone cold, terrified of her and her power and realizes after a lifetime of terrorizing women that this is the one who can actually end him. Even her boyfriend frightens him.

Speaker 12 It's incredible that he couldn't couldn't just say, congratulations. He has to take credit, which is sickening.

Speaker 13 Bill Maher had a really interesting take on Taylor Swift, and he said that Taylor Swift could swing the election. Yeah.
And in his, his, I mean, it was really interesting what he said.

Speaker 13 She's from Pennsylvania. She's white.
She's dating a white guy. She's a country star.

Speaker 13 And she doesn't even need to endorse Biden. She just needs to encourage people to turn out the vote because who will she turn out? She'll turn out young people.

Speaker 13 And younger Americans tend to be browner, which means they're more Democratic.

Speaker 13 She could literally swing the election. The strategy that would be just so genius here if she, in fact, would like to see.
I can't imagine any woman.

Speaker 12 She backed Biden before. She's not, and she was anti-Trump, but go ahead.

Speaker 13 Yeah, so we know she's pro-Biden, but here's the thing. The strategy is not to be pro-Biden.
She should never use President Biden's name. She should never use Donald Trump's name.

Speaker 13 She should just talk about turning out the vote.

Speaker 12 Exactly. But I don't, she backed Biden before.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it. She could say, what a heinous rapist.

Speaker 13 Like, I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We got to be smart here.

Speaker 13 We got to stop trying to shame people into not voting for Trump. We got to be smart.
If you get young people to turn out, he wins. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. That's true.
That's true. Anyway, I would recommend people watch Americana, where she talks about

Speaker 12 how dangerous it is. Her father was very concerned about her attacking Marsha Blackbourne and

Speaker 12 backing Democrats because of her safety. Anyway, it was interesting.
It was an interesting thing. Anyway, anyway it was a great super bowl kudos to it um now let's move on to our first big story

Speaker 12 special counsel robert her has released his report on president joe biden's handling of classified documents report concludes no criminal charges against biden are warranted and also says uh there was evidence that biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials as a private citizen there were a number of references to biden's cognitive abilities notably calling him a sympathetic well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory I have to say, this was the media coverage is out of context of what I read the entire thing.

Speaker 12 And if you read it, which no one will,

Speaker 12 nonetheless, this is what happened. It was damaging.

Speaker 12 Biden lashed out at special counsel during a press conference late last week, particularly at the claim that he could not remember the year his son Bo died.

Speaker 12 That was the guy was talking about strategy around a trial.

Speaker 12 Biden did mix up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico at a press conference that said Donald Trump mixed up the presidents of, I think, Turkey, and then he thought Nikki Haley was Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker 12 So let me just equalize that. Donald Trump also weighed in saying if Biden was going to be charged with classified documents, and neither should he, calling his own case selective persecution.

Speaker 12 It is not.

Speaker 12 So it obviously created a lot of things. People were furious about the number of stories in the New York Times and columns.

Speaker 12 And I would agree, there were seven of them talking about Biden's age and nothing. And they did not put what Trump said a day later about letting the Russians attack Europe in the same spot.

Speaker 12 It was very weird media selection. I never say the media is biased, but boy, was that something to see.

Speaker 12 It's still a problem. And a large amount of people believe both are too old.
I think over 60%.

Speaker 12 More people believe Biden is too old compared to Trump. Let's not equalize it.
Trump has 91 indictments. It's not comparable.

Speaker 12 But it's still a problem. So, and you've talked about this a lot.

Speaker 12 So what do you think about this? Well, how do you get beyond this? I think you saw him moving out last night during the Super Bowl, even though he didn't do the traditional interview.

Speaker 12 He did a ton of social media. It was all very clever, funny, making fun of himself.

Speaker 12 He's got to get out there, I think, ultimately.

Speaker 12 What are your thoughts?

Speaker 13 I saw it simple as either really poor judgment or a planned hit piece, because he was there to talk about the legal veracity of these documents, which the president, President Biden turned over versus President Trump tried to hide and destroy evidence.

Speaker 13 And again, it goes back to what my friend Dev Seidman says. It's not what you do, it's how you do it.
And basically, the special prosecutor did his job to the extent that it was clear. He said,

Speaker 13 this was an error in judgment. As soon as he recognized his error in judgment, he fully cooperated, and he's the one that disclosed he had these documents.

Speaker 13 So he drew sharp relief between the two cases and did his job.

Speaker 13 He's not there, though, to be a neurobiologist and make comments that anyone reviewing this thing would go, you realize this is going to be blown up into something much bigger.

Speaker 13 And it has no legal frame. It's not appropriate.

Speaker 13 Now, the larger issue here is that when you have a 77 or 78-year-old obese man and an 81-year-old man, there's about a 7% chance every year that they're going to die.

Speaker 13 So essentially, between now and the election, there's a little less than a coin-flip chance that one of these two slips and breaks a hip or something like that.

Speaker 13 And what is just so upsetting and frustrating is that America produces more remarkable people, I believe, than any nation in history. We have remarkable military leaders.

Speaker 13 We have remarkable artists, business people. Every time I go to Washington, as much as we should post-Washington, I meet remarkable people.

Speaker 13 And we end up with two people, quite frankly, that just should... be nowhere near the White House because of biology.
It has nothing about their character. Let's just put that aside right now.

Speaker 13 People this old should not be put in positions that require this exacting cognitive, physical, and emotional and mental stamina, which nobody has at that age.

Speaker 13 I don't care if you're fucking Jack Lelaine. This is just insane.
But anyways, here we are. Here we are.
But the reality is

Speaker 13 they're both really old men. And so

Speaker 13 I find it discouraging that those are the two people we've produced. But this, in my view, was either very poor judgment or a naked hit piece.

Speaker 13 Because to think that this wasn't going to go crazy in the media, and I think we're going to zero in on this shit was just not to be honest with the impact.

Speaker 12 I thought the media could have done a much better job because Trump has been saying, like, literally at Pennsylvania and then North Carolina, he said a series of incoherent things.

Speaker 12 I think the point I was trying to make actually on Chris Wallace, the show, because they were like, this is a big problem. Like, are you Trump? You know,

Speaker 12 he's not as Trump isn't as bad. I'm like, almost worse, because he says incoherent things.

Speaker 13 Gotten used to it, Trump. He lies so much that we don't think it's cognitive decline.

Speaker 12 Someone wrote, he, Trump is incoherent and occasionally is coherent, and Biden is coherent and is occasionally incoherent. But more, more than that,

Speaker 12 Biden has always had gaffes, right? He's definitely old, no question. He has more gaffes than ever.
He's always has gaffes. Trump is getting increasingly insane.

Speaker 12 And that's like, it reminds me, and the reason I think Biden gets more attacked for it is because he's that, I'm thinking of a nursing home.

Speaker 12 He's the nice guy in the nursing home and occasionally can't find his apartment, right? That kind of, like, I'm going to use a metaphor.

Speaker 12 Trump is the guy in the, in the cafeteria who's, who accuses everyone of stealing his fork or his jello or whatever.

Speaker 12 The reason he seems more vigorous is because he's louder, but that doesn't make him any less cognitively disabled, right? He just seems vigorous.

Speaker 12 And that's true, but the crazy one in the nursing home is the one I'm worried about. The loud one is the one I'm worried about.

Speaker 12 And not the sort of friendly old guy who's effective, by the way, speaking of which. Now,

Speaker 12 the day, let me just say, the day after

Speaker 12 his comments, encouraging Russia to do whatever the hell they want to any NATO country, doesn't mean defense guidelines.

Speaker 12 This is a dangerous, incoherent person who already was problematic.

Speaker 12 NATO's Secretary General said Trump's words could undermine security and put American and European forces at risk. These comments,

Speaker 12 and Nikki Hill even said this kind of comment that makes Joe Biden look clear-headed. Joe Biden is clear-headed about this.

Speaker 12 These comments are

Speaker 12 if he's not incoherent, then he's dangerously leading us into a world war. It's just astonishing that there's even a comparison between the two and that equalization of this.

Speaker 12 And the fact that the New York Times did not put this on the very top of of the thing and kept referring to Joe Biden's that stupid report was, I think, a dereliction of their duty.

Speaker 12 I never say that about the media, but in this case, when I heard that out of his mouth, I was like, are you kidding me? What he just said?

Speaker 12 Dangerous. And if he meant it, he's dangerous.
And if he's incoherent, he's even worse, more dangerous. Your thoughts?

Speaker 13 Well, someone called me over the weekend and said,

Speaker 13 you know, if you were asked, the quote unquote, the Democrats, how would you deal with this issue?

Speaker 13 And I said, you're getting one thing right, but you're forgetting the second, you know, you got the peanut butter right, but you're missing the chocolate. Him taking it as humorous.

Speaker 13 Humor reflects intellect, and it reflects, it makes light of the issue, and

Speaker 13 you kind of turn the situation around. And they're doing a great job of having Biden joke about it.
Where they're failing is that it should be the following.

Speaker 13 That is, no one person runs the largest country in the world. It's never been one person.
It's an entire infrastructure. It's a person running a company.

Speaker 13 This is the most robust, youthful, vigorous administration in history. We have, for the first time, a young woman as vice president.
We have a secretary of transportation who

Speaker 13 is just into his 40s. We have secretaries of state who are young and vigorous, not old men from Exxon.
And by the way,

Speaker 13 young, vigorous people who work really hard, you're loyal to them and you create a culture of youth and loyalty and innovation.

Speaker 13 And that's what they have in the White House versus this revolving door of old white men, including fucking Peter Navarro, who's going to prison.

Speaker 13 I mean, if you want to talk about an administration, you don't talk about a president. You talk about the presidency.

Speaker 13 And this is a group of people who are the most youthful, robust, and innovative in history. And that's how they should position it.
Yeah, he's old. There's nothing they can do about it.

Speaker 13 But look at who he surrounds himself with.

Speaker 12 Well, although Republicans use that as they're all really running it in his place, that he's just weakened at Bernie's. So I was on a panel, I think it was Brett Season called weekend at Bernie's.

Speaker 12 Fuck you on that one. I got to say, I couldn't say that on the air, but he's not weekend at Bernie's.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 Yep. Trump just kept firing them and then they kept turning on the guy and either running against him or ending up in jail.
That's not youthful. That's about as primitive as you can get.

Speaker 12 And if you, you have to look at, and we're not usually this week, but you have to look at the people who've worked for him.

Speaker 12 Every person who's worked for him who's left calls him a moron, crazy, incoherent, possibly insane, you know, all this stuff.

Speaker 12 I'm sorry, it's just not the same with Joe Biden. And the equalization of it cannot be allowed to happen.
And I absolutely get why people do it because most people have the kind of old guy.

Speaker 12 Most people know the old guy Joe Biden is. They're not used to crazy, like really malevolently crazy old people.
There's only a few of those, right? Comparatively.

Speaker 12 And so that's what they're worried about.

Speaker 12 What they should be worried about is a highly incoherent person who's becoming increasingly incoherent is overweight is is clearly been red pilled in a way that's really disturbing and is and you know even just uh attacking nikki haley's husband where's her husband where's her husband he's deployed in the military

Speaker 12 you fucker like fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck you like that kind of thing and you know as someone whose dad was in the military it's astonishing and he did it before he did it with the reds the gold star family he did it with john mccain oh come on i don't like people who've been captured.

Speaker 13 But here's the problem.

Speaker 13 There's no such thing as shaming people into not voting for the guy.

Speaker 12 No, there isn't. They've got to focus.

Speaker 13 They've got to play offense.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 I think they should absolutely highlight and get some of that youth out there. Because the way I would position it is the president is old.
There's no getting around it. He still has the faculties.

Speaker 13 He makes great decisions.

Speaker 13 Don't measure behaviors. Don't measure gaps.
Measure results. The results here are the best in history.
Jobs, Jobs, low unemployment, they're the best in history. His age is an issue.

Speaker 13 He has the most youthful presidency in the history of the country.

Speaker 12 Yeah, good. I like that.
Scott, they should hire you.

Speaker 13 Decide what team you want.

Speaker 12 One of the things, they should also like vitamin this man up and get him out there.

Speaker 12 They got to like, you know, there's ways to make people cognitively like sharper and just let him sleep, get him out there. You know, everyone who has gets, you and I both know it.

Speaker 12 We get, when we get tired, we start to make mistakes, right? So, and we're not that old,

Speaker 12 But it happens. So, anyway, we have to go on a quick break.
I think they should hire you, Scott. When we come back, we'll discuss Disney's new adventure with Epic Games, a big deal.

Speaker 12 And we'll chat with friends of Pivot, Zoe Schiffer, and Kurt Wagner about Elon Musk's chaotic reign at Twitter.

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Speaker 12 Scott, we're back. Disney has turned the corner and entered a new year, according to CEO Bob Iger, following a blockbuster first quarter earnings report.

Speaker 12 Earnings per share rose 23%, beating estimates, the company cut streaming losses more than expected to $138 million. Pretty good, manageable, and also says it will boost its cash dividend by 50%.

Speaker 12 Disney also made a slew of other announcements, including an ESPN streaming service in 2025, an exclusive version of Taylor Swift's Era's tour movie that will stream on Disney Plus, Smart Move, and a Moana sequel.

Speaker 12 Also, Frozen is coming. I got that directly from Bob Iger, which, of course, he wants me to spend more on Frozen.

Speaker 12 And perhaps the biggest news of all, Disney is getting into gaming, acquiring a $1.5 billion stake in Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite.

Speaker 12 Scott, you had talked about Disney being a buy, one of your buys.

Speaker 12 Talk about the move into gaming. You predicted this in various forms over the last few years.
You thought Disney should acquire Roblox or Netflix would buy Epic.

Speaker 12 I think he's doing, you know, he has Nelson Pell's proxy fight looming. I think he's doing his Bob Iger thing.
So what do you think about this?

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 13 I picked two or three stocks every year. My picks this year were

Speaker 13 Alphabet. I think this year's The Empire Strikes Back in terms of generative AI.
I just think the data set they have to work with, your calendar, your YouTube viewership are just unparalleled.

Speaker 13 And I picked Disney and Warren Brothers Discovery because I think the tech stuff that everyone loves is so fully valued in my view. I wanted to go after stuff that's distressed.

Speaker 13 And Disney's trading at a 10-year low, and it has unparalleled IP. I think Bob is a very solid executive.

Speaker 13 What they lost was the narrative, and it wasn't entirely sure what they were, what the strategy was. And I think he sort of turned it around and appears to be playing offense after the layoffs.

Speaker 13 Streaming's now making money. The parks are just this unsung juggernaut of a business.
I think they did 10 billion in EBITDA this year.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 so, Epic, just disclosure, Epic is one of my biggest investments. In 2021, I made a purchase in the private markets.
You know, there's all these platforms now that sell shares.

Speaker 13 Secondary shares are from employees. And I did it for a couple of reasons.
One, I wanted some exposure to what is a $180 million market, the gaming industry.

Speaker 13 Epic has Fortnite, which I see as just an unbelievable.

Speaker 13 My 13-year-old is, I want to say addicted, but the reason I like video games more than social media is our actual social.

Speaker 13 I just, one of the nicest moments of my week is my son has this battle cry that he screams out from the room when he's playing Fortnite with his buddies.

Speaker 13 And they're really elegant in terms of how they monetize it. They also have sort of this underlying infrastructure.
So I thought I want some exposure to the space.

Speaker 13 Now it's, it, it adds to the flywheel of Disney because you can't, you can imagine they're probably going to come up with all sorts of rides, maybe even, you know, I got to think there's going to be a Fortnite movie series in the makings.

Speaker 13 So this is, and this also

Speaker 12 probably watched Barbie very carefully, right? They probably 100%.

Speaker 13 And this gives them a chance to date maybe before they acquired the company.

Speaker 12 What was interesting is the valuation on it was about 21 or 22 billion, which was actually lower than the valuation was last year but the moment disney made the investment it began trading up in the secondary market because everybody sees you know the validation of having disney involved i think this is good for epic i think it's good for disney i think it's good for bob iger i you know win-win-win yeah let me put some context in here disney has been in gaming they tried club penguin mostly for kids they bought a bunch i'm blanking on all the tapulous they had a lot of app stuff and it had didn't work out well for maker studio remember that one maker yeah oh yeah sure that was a more video oriented it wasn't gaming but they were in a lot of gaming stuff especially around kids my kids had club penguin um i write about it a little bit in my upcoming book but they never were able to make it work because they never really they bought these companies but they weren't committed to gaming this is a very important gaming company uh you know this is what it does is it puts them at odds with apple which is in a you know in a very serious legal fight over uh app store stuff with epic um and the ceo is particular i'm going to hopefully interview him soon um but uh it puts them at odds with Apple, which is one of their partners, right?

Speaker 12 Who's been Iger and Apple have been very close.

Speaker 12 But they have to get into it. It's sort of like, you know, whatever you think of the Vision Pro,

Speaker 12 Apple has to get into

Speaker 12 spatial computing or facial computing, really.

Speaker 12 And they have to get into gaming. This is a critical part.
Netflix has kind of dabbled in it by creating a gaming thing, but Disney's got to own this area in a really significant way.

Speaker 12 And this is what they do now, especially because the Nelson Peltz proxy fight is still looming. Iger addressed it in an interview with CNBC last week following the earnings report.
Let's listen.

Speaker 13 The last thing that we need right now is to be distracted in terms of our time, our energy, by an activist or activists that, frankly, have a completely different agenda and don't understand our company, its assets, even the essence of the Disney brand.

Speaker 12 No, that's him. He's pushing back and he has been.
For his part, Peltz responded to Disney's latest earnings saying it's deja vu all over again.

Speaker 12 we saw the movie last year and didn't like the ending nelson you got to go away stop hanging out with elon musk etc um i think he's going to fend off pelts pelts is looking kind of he's kind of ruining his brand here um he's doing things that are right for this company and and to to sort of bad mouth it when he's doing the streaming got better this is a really interesting deal the marks are doing well i mean this is a difficult turnaround for bob iger some of which is his own fault right no question but he was right about going into streaming even though it is costly.

Speaker 12 So I think Peltz looks like a pots.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but the ultimate shark repellent for an activist is when the stock goes up. The stock's up 22% in the last 30 days.
And so what happens is if the stock goes up, this is what happens.

Speaker 13 When you're an activist investor, which I've done, you never win at the first meeting,

Speaker 13 at the first annual meeting. But if the stock continues to go down, you win at the second.
If the stock continues to go up, as the activist, you just sell your stake. You're in it for money.

Speaker 13 You're not in it for victories or wins. I mean, these guys have big egos, but for the most part, they're in it to make money.
So

Speaker 13 if this stock does what I think it's going to do, and I think it's up 50 to 100% in 12 months, Heltz will declare victory and leave, never run another proxy fight, make a shit ton of money, and Bob will not have this guy on his board.

Speaker 13 I disagree.

Speaker 13 I've been in a ton of these situations. Bob has a bunch of people on the board who are not scared of Nelson Peltz.

Speaker 13 They would have stuck the angry guy in the corner and let him punch himself out and gotten on with the board meeting. And then they wouldn't have have had this detractor heckling from the cheap seats.

Speaker 13 If the stock continues to go up, Nelson Peltz will sell and go away, and everyone wins.

Speaker 12 Right. Yeah, that's it.
He's not winning on this one. Anyway, we'll see what happens.
Iger did a great job with this. I think Epic is really interesting and really sharp move by him.

Speaker 12 And it's not that risky, but it's also not unrisky, which is just the way you want to be. All right, let's bring in our friends of Pivot.

Speaker 12 Zoe Schiffer is the managing editor of Platformer and the author of Extremely Hardcore Inside Elon Musk Twitter.

Speaker 12 Kurt Wagner covers social media for Bloomberg and is the author of Battle for the Bird, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 billion fight for Twitter's soul. Twitter books are here, everybody.

Speaker 12 Welcome. Two people I have great regard for.
Kurt used to work for me a long time ago, and Zoe works for Casey Newton, who's a very good friend of mine. Both amazing reporters.
Welcome to both of you.

Speaker 12 Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Thank you so much for having us. So let's start.
You both have Twitter books. You're competing.
We decided to bring you together.

Speaker 12 I'm sorry to do this, but it's better for you. It's better because we're going to talk about both your books and

Speaker 12 they're

Speaker 12 different in lots of ways. And we want to distinguish them and why you should read both.

Speaker 12 Anyway, Kurt, you detail in your book how Twitter was already having problems during the Jack Dorsey years, well before Elon came onto the scene.

Speaker 12 He obviously was at the Super Bowl last night, sitting there looking forlorn, as always.

Speaker 12 Talk about, let's talk about the history. You covered this for us at Recode for many years.

Speaker 12 Some news from the weekend, a federal judge ordered Elon to testify again in the SEC's probe of his version of Twitter.

Speaker 12 The SEC is examining whether Elon followed a law when filing the paperwork about his purchases of Twitter stock and whether his statements about the deal were accurate.

Speaker 12 But let's start with you, because the Jack Dorsey years, because he kind of pushed this and thought it would be great for Twitter. So talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 14 He did. I mean, he admired Elon tremendously.
He used to refer to him as his favorite tweeter.

Speaker 12 He invited him to corporate offsets. Yeah,

Speaker 14 he really

Speaker 14 had kind of an admiration for Elon. And so when this opportunity presented itself,

Speaker 14 I think Jack was super excited about it. You know, he'd been talking, and Kara, you've heard this before as well, but he'd been talking for years about how Twitter shouldn't be a public company.

Speaker 14 Like Jack was very much of this mindset that Twitter should be private, that it should be out of

Speaker 14 the pressures of the Wall Street investor cooker. And so when Elon showed up and had the money to do this thing that Jack had wanted to have done for a long time, he jumped at it.

Speaker 14 Obviously, I think it was a mistake, but that's one of the reasons that he was so excited for Elon to take over.

Speaker 12 Well, talk a little bit about the problems there. We covered this for years, both of us.

Speaker 12 It was a, you know, as Mark Duckman said, a clown car that ran into a gold mine. And it was always a clown car and a very emotional one.

Speaker 14 It was a company that had tremendous influence that outweighed its business by, you know, an order of magnitude, right? And so people talked about it.

Speaker 14 People used it and used it for politics and sports and other cultural things, but the business never caught up. And that was why it was always in this really tough position.

Speaker 14 And one of the things that my book gets into is actually,

Speaker 14 you know, Jack Dorsey had orchestrated this three-year business plan right before Elon showed up. And it was very ambitious.
It was coming off the heels of COVID.

Speaker 14 They were like, hey, we're going to, you know, add more users than we've ever added. We're going to build more revenue than we've ever had.
And they were not on pace to hit any of these things.

Speaker 12 And so,

Speaker 14 yeah, you look into the future and you just realize they're kind of headed for this disaster financially as a publicly traded company.

Speaker 14 So again, I think the board also saw Elon as an escape from having to go through what they knew was going to be a bad situation.

Speaker 12 And no one else wanted to buy it. Zoe, is there a scenario where Elon could have been successful at the helm of Twitter? Let's get.
So he buys it. He tries not to buy it.

Speaker 12 I guess he just, he decided to say, I'll buy it no matter what. And then, of course, tried to backtrack on it.

Speaker 12 You write the attributes that made Musk good at tweeting, a combination of recklessness and shamelessness.

Speaker 12 I think you're being kind, but you're right on those things made him exceedingly bad at running Twitter. Talk about that transition because I even thought he would be good.

Speaker 12 I was like, okay, let's try this because it was such a, it was such a disaster as a company.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think there's this narrative now that the media was very biased against Elon's acquisition from the beginning. And that's actually incorrect.

Speaker 15 There was a lot of excitement, even from a small group of employees and people in the media about the acquisition because, like Kurt said, Twitter had been in such a bad place kind of financially and growth-wise for so long.

Speaker 15 There was a lot of frustration from even certain employees about this.

Speaker 15 What Elon did, and what I feel like was such a big unforced error, is that he came in with this posture of everyone who works here is an idiot, and I don't want to listen to you.

Speaker 15 He didn't come in with an immense amount of curiosity.

Speaker 15 When he sat down with employees from day one and they were explaining the technical back end of how Twitter worked, he would interrupt them and kind of talk about his own expertise, or he would look really bored or be scrolling on his phone.

Speaker 15 So from day one,

Speaker 15 he wasn't really interested in what the people who had worked there and had worked so hard to make Twitter successful had to say.

Speaker 12 And why was that from your perspective?

Speaker 15 I think that he felt like Twitter had been sliding in a bad direction.

Speaker 15 And he really conflated some of the attributes of Twitter's company culture with this big fear he had around the woke mind virus, the idea that employees got a day of rest off every month, that they got pretty good perks.

Speaker 15 It was, in his mind,

Speaker 15 a culture of laziness, of people who didn't want to work hard, who didn't want to be hardcore.

Speaker 15 And he felt like if I can put rockets into space, if I can build electric vehicles, then surely I'll be able to come in and fix Twitter, no problem.

Speaker 12 Because it's a media company, Scott.

Speaker 13 If I can only read one of your books, which should I read? Just kidding.

Speaker 12 Oh, stop.

Speaker 12 But go ahead. You won't read mine either.
Don't worry, guys. He's not going to read my book either.
But go ahead.

Speaker 13 Isn't Twitter the ultimate side piece? You know, you have a guy guy who is

Speaker 13 making

Speaker 13 tens of billions of dollars at a payments company, kind of showing up every once in a while and just nodding.

Speaker 13 And then you have a guy making tens of millions somewhere else, showing up every once in a while to tell them how fucking stupid they are and then get back to other shit.

Speaker 13 And now you have a CEO who's literally in overhead, who has no business running a company like this. Isn't this arguably

Speaker 13 having a difficult time thinking of any company that's had three worst CEOs?

Speaker 14 I think that the fact that there's been so much turnover at the CEO, like I think this is one of the worst CEO jobs around because it sounds really glamorous, right? It's Twitter.

Speaker 14 You get to like show up at the Super Bowl. You get to, you know, do all these things.
You're culturally relevant, which is really exciting to a lot of people.

Speaker 14 But again, the business was always a bit of a disaster.

Speaker 14 It comes with all these huge problems around content moderation that people, you know, think are going to be super easy to solve and they're never as black and white as they seem.

Speaker 14 And there's a reason, like Dick Costolo, he had a great quote, actually, he shared this with Kara during an interview. He said, running Twitter is like running any other company in dog years.

Speaker 14 It's like one year at Twitter is seven years somewhere else.

Speaker 14 It's because it's a really thankless, terrible job, but people think it's going to be cool because it's Twitter and there's a cultural element to it. And I think that that bothers people.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, this isn't as true at the CEO level, but it was true for a lot of the board members and the management.

Speaker 15 One of the key frustrations that employees had is that so few people at the highest levels of the company even tweeted. They didn't like use the product.

Speaker 15 And a lot of employees joined because they loved Twitter as a product. And then they were there.

Speaker 15 And it felt like there was an immense lack of understanding of what Twitter even was and what made it special.

Speaker 15 So many of the features that we think of as critical and crucial to how Twitter works actually came from the community.

Speaker 15 It was things that users found to organize the conversation and literally begged Twitter for years to codify into the feature set. And then Twitter would kind of begrudgingly do it.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of thing about a kid. When it was good, it was very, very good.
And when it was bad, it was awful, you know, in terms of, but it was always an awful business.

Speaker 12 I think it just has morphed into an awful place in a lot of ways. Although last night with the Super Bowl, it was fun, right, for a second again.

Speaker 12 But both of you talked to a number of former employees for these books. Was something you found particularly shocking or surprising? Zoe, you start, and then Kurt.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that we know, but I kind of overlooked at the beginning was just there was this, it was a small group, but there was kind of a core group of employees who were really frustrated with Twitter 1.0.

Speaker 15 They felt like it was incredibly inefficient. They wanted to hustle and get stuff done and ship new features.

Speaker 15 And they just felt like it was, there were so many roadblocks in Twitter prior to Elon Musk coming on board.

Speaker 15 And so when they saw Elon coming in, talking about efficiency, shipping product really fast, they were actually really, really excited.

Speaker 15 And yet even those people who were so loyal and all in on Twitter 2.0, all in on this hardcore vision, became incredibly disillusioned over the months that followed. Why?

Speaker 15 Because they felt like his product sense, the kind of core thing that he thought they thought he was going to bring, you know, maybe culturally he won't be that great.

Speaker 15 Maybe he'll be kind of rude in person, but like his product sense will be really, really good. That just didn't feel like it was in place.
He would kind of come up with ideas on a whim.

Speaker 15 It felt like his mentions were dictating what employees were working on.

Speaker 15 If a high profile person was in his mentions complaining about something, all of a sudden it would be code read, the top engineering project of the day.

Speaker 15 And they were being torn in a lot of directions at once. It was like, fix this content moderation problem immediately right now.
Elon's really upset about it.

Speaker 15 But also we need to ship this other thing right now. It needs to be done by the following morning or everyone's fired.
And no amount of loyalty would ensure that people would keep their jobs.

Speaker 12 So, Kurt, talk about that. That's behaving like a king, right? Which he behaves everywhere else if you start to really plumb at his other companies.

Speaker 14 And one of the things that... I'm sure Zoe saw and I saw as well is that a lot of his product decisions and a lot of his direction came from his own personal experience, right?

Speaker 14 He's basically running this thing in a way that fits for him, but he is not the average user. He's not even close to the average user, right?

Speaker 14 He's got 160 million followers and he's the richest man in the world.

Speaker 14 So he's kind of, you know, creating a public good or a public service as he wants to sort of think of it as, but he's doing it in a way that suits his own personality, which is not.

Speaker 14 a very useful way for the rest of us.

Speaker 12 What about the increasing radicalization of him? He's really changed, as anyone who's spent any time with him. Talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 14 I mean, there's a couple theories around this. I think one of mine is simply that like this is a this was a really easy way to differentiate what he's doing at X versus what Twitter was, right?

Speaker 14 I mean, it was clear that Twitter wasn't working, right? Even Jack Dorsey didn't think Twitter was working.

Speaker 14 And so one thing you can do if you're the new guy is to come in and just be the exact opposite of what the old guy was doing.

Speaker 14 And so part of me wonders how much of this like shift to the right, this shift to very, you know, very kind of conservative, anti-woke mindset of Elon is really, you know, a business decision in some ways.

Speaker 14 It's a way to differentiate himself in what X is building and bring in people who were disillusioned by the old version of Twitter.

Speaker 12 Oh, I think it's very real. Zoe?

Speaker 15 Well, I'm curious what you think about this because I also, I agree with everything Kurt's saying.

Speaker 15 And I also feel like the Elon Musk that's building Twitter or X is a very different Elon Musk from the one that was building Tesla.

Speaker 15 And I think one difference is that he has a lot fewer people around him who will tell him the truth. It feels like his circle has gotten smaller and it's gotten more sycophantic.

Speaker 15 It's like the people that are close to him are total yes men. And when he's retelling a joke for the third time, no one's going to tell him that he's doing that.

Speaker 15 When he's making a horrible decision or going after someone and harassing them, no one really stands up. And if they do, it's a lower level employee who's instantly out the door.

Speaker 15 But you know him, you knew him much better than us in the earlier days.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think, I think I would point to the two Wall Street Journal articles recently about drug issues and then the board, the enabling board, and Scott maybe has a question about this, but the board was highly enabling and because they made money.

Speaker 12 And I thought that was the most important thing to point out is everyone who's enabling him and licking him up and down all day either wants to be on the plane or wants to, I don't know why you would, because it sounds, you know, I'd rather be with Taylor Swift, but if I was going to suck up to someone.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 he, you know, the enablers are really quite something and they literally can't. And I've had some of them come up to me saying, we can't say anything.
Keep saying it publicly because we can't.

Speaker 12 And I'm like, fuck you. That's what I, you know what I mean? I was like, yes, you can, but you have, you're in love with your hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 12 I don't think, how much money do you need?

Speaker 13 I'm curious what, what do you know about the business where it stands today? I just can't imagine any advertiser would think, oh, we should advertise on Twitter. What do the financials look like?

Speaker 13 And do you have any insight into

Speaker 13 whether these three banks that hold the debt are going to try and offload the debt?

Speaker 13 What are the atmospherics around the current business? business?

Speaker 14 I can go first. Sure.
I read a little bit about this, and I'm interested if Zoe's heard similar or not, but

Speaker 14 that in the Q4, so the holiday quarter, which is obviously a huge one for advertisers, that their target was around 2.5 billion in advertising revenue.

Speaker 14 Now, that's a little more than half of what they did two years earlier, the last full year before Elon was there.

Speaker 14 And this was also before Elon told advertisers to, you know, go fuck yourself on stage at Deal Books. So I would be shocked if they hit that, quite frankly.

Speaker 14 And I was having conversations with advertisers, you know, about the past month, both after CES, but before the Super Bowl, to just get a feel for what they were thinking.

Speaker 14 And almost all of them said the same thing, which is like, our clients don't feel comfortable coming back because Elon is so unpredictable.

Speaker 14 It's not even necessarily the stuff that's happening on the platform. It's, it's Elon himself.
And it was very telling yesterday, the Super Bowl, biggest ad day of the year for X.

Speaker 14 Elon was tweeting about boobs. I don't know if you guys saw this.

Speaker 14 He was like literally posting the morning of the Super Bowl when all these advertisers, they've been luring them back, trying to convince them this is a safe place.

Speaker 14 And he's coming and he's posting these things that are just head scratchers. And until he stops doing that, I don't think advertisers are going to be super comfortable.

Speaker 12 He's not going to stop doing that. And let me underscore he's 52, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I have heard the same thing as Kurt.
It's not a surprise. He said one year after he bought the company that it was worth $19 billion.
He bought it for $44 billion.

Speaker 15 He said himself he didn't buy Twitter to make money

Speaker 15 and that he would rather be able to say what he wants to say when he wants to say it, consequences be damned. And I think he keeps doing those exact things.

Speaker 15 He's had this tortured relationship with advertisers from day one because why? Advertisers are content moderators.

Speaker 15 They're going to pull ad dollars if you say, if you talk about Boopster in the Super Bowl, and yet he seems to not be able to help himself.

Speaker 15 And if that's because of, like Kara pointed to, the drug use that's been documented very well by the Wall Street Journal, or simply because he has a very childish sense of humor, we don't know, but he has very few checks and balances on his power, and he seems to not care if it hurts the business.

Speaker 12 So, where does CEO Linda Yaccarino, and I'm using CEO term loosely, fit into all of this, if at all?

Speaker 14 I guess I'll give her credit for this. I mean, the Super Bowl actually brought some real advertisers back to X.
I was actually sort of surprised.

Speaker 14 And, you know, that's only going to happen if someone is there to convince them to do it.

Speaker 12 She's very good at them, right?

Speaker 14 Yeah, she's in that world. She's from that world.
People, before she took this job, I believe people like really respected her and

Speaker 14 admired her in that industry. And so clearly she is doing what she can to like build on those relationships and bring people back.

Speaker 14 But she has a boss who is constantly working against her, which is not, which is not easy. And

Speaker 14 I don't think you should necessarily let her off the hook here either, right? I mean, she's choosing to be there. She's choosing to

Speaker 14 kind of support Elon and the things that he is saying sometimes.

Speaker 14 But I think they're working almost against each other often because she's out trying to sell this stuff and he's just, you know, lighting it on fire at the same time.

Speaker 12 Let me say, I know a lot of people closer. She's all in.
She's blaming everybody else, including me.

Speaker 15 That's what I was going to say. Everything we know so far is that she's completely all in on the vision still and she is doing what she was hired to do, which is clean up Elon Musk's messes.

Speaker 12 Well, she also thinks he's the greatest mind in all of history, from what I understand.

Speaker 12 Okay, sure. Yeah, why not? I'd go with Einstein, perhaps.

Speaker 13 There's been so many rumors of so many different businesses' payments, right? The X, the everything app. Do you have any sense for what is actually going to happen in terms of a product roadmap in 24?

Speaker 15 I mean, we know that they're working on a complete app redesign and revamp and payments are going to be a really big part of that. But I have such suspicion about the everything app terminology even.

Speaker 15 When he first bought the company, he hosted an all-hands meeting with employees and someone asked very specifically, are you going to try and make us like WeChat? And he scoffed.

Speaker 15 He was like, that's a ridiculous question. I just use it as an example.
Everything app can mean a lot of different things. Since then, we've heard him talk about literally making X a lot like WeChat.

Speaker 15 This isn't a vision that feels like it comes from a serious strategy. It feels like something that happens on a whim.

Speaker 15 Take just one example, which is Elon Musk's decision to limit API access for third-party developers.

Speaker 15 If you are truly building a super app, you want third-party developers building apps on top of your app because with 1500, 1,000 engineers, you're not going to be able to build all of the functionality that you need in order to create a really robust super app.

Speaker 15 And yet we see him saying things and then doing the exact opposite in practice.

Speaker 14 Well, if I could add to that too, I mean, we've

Speaker 14 Mark Zuckerberg tried to do this at Meta or back at Facebook, right? With Messenger. They're kind of trying to do it a little bit with WhatsApp, and it didn't work.

Speaker 14 And Messenger is way bigger than Twitter was. I'd say Mark Zuckerberg is probably a much better executor of these kind of like software, consumer software ideas than Elon is.

Speaker 12 And I just don't think that this idea of a super app is super relevant to you know folks in the United States quite frankly like it it has some appeal in Asia but yeah I just I'm with Zoe he has been fix sighted on for years Zoe he has he talked about it a long time ago yeah yeah but no no but it's just like I'm interested in world peace it doesn't mean it's gonna happen like kind of thing it's just not clear to me what that even means to him so what is the what is what's the thing they're gonna do what's the revenue as Scott just asked what is is there anything they could do give me an idea each of you I mean I think payments are are the big push, but I would be curious, like, what Kurt's, I, I, I think that that's the, the kind of x.com vision from the 90s is, is integrating

Speaker 12 Tucker Carlson network, right?

Speaker 14 I, yeah, I'm not going to say this is going to work, but because this is where they're headed, I'll, I'll point it out.

Speaker 14 They're, they're going into this professionally produced video route that we actually saw with the Twitter 1.0

Speaker 14 guys. Yeah.
And, you know, the idea being, hey, if we have WWE Wrestling and we have Don Lemon and we have Tucker Carlson and, you know, God willing, we're going to partner with the NFL.

Speaker 14 That's never going to happen, but let's pretend, right?

Speaker 14 Maybe, maybe, maybe they could get some high-quality video advertisers to come back because they know they're advertising against the NFL or the WWE.

Speaker 14 They're not advertising against random, you know, people in your feed. We saw this play out with Twitter 1.0.
It did not work.

Speaker 14 I'm not necessarily convinced it's going to work here, but since that's the direction they're going, I'll say that that might be what we're going to see over the next year.

Speaker 12 You young people don't remember when Yahoo did news. Everyone wore Banana Republic outfits, it didn't work.

Speaker 15 Um, I feel like that's kind of their vision of what's going to happen. If you were going to ask me what I think is actually going to happen, I think XAI subsumes X.

Speaker 15 I think the focus becomes large language models, and X becomes an input for those models, a training ground for those models. But the focus and the momentum shifts.

Speaker 13 But what's the consumer-facing product there?

Speaker 15 I mean, a chat GPT rival.

Speaker 13 Oh, I see. Got it.

Speaker 14 I mean, X could still exist, right? Because you still want the training data for all that. And like, X still exists.

Speaker 15 But I think what we're seeing with like Quora, where all of the new investment dollars are coming in, but they're coming in to fund the AI initiatives.

Speaker 15 They're not going to revamp Quora and make Quora better. Like that to me is the corollary here.
This is a prediction. This is just what I think.

Speaker 12 But what is the most surprising thing that you found, the single most surprising in a very short order? And

Speaker 12 will Elon own this thing going forward five years? I say yes.

Speaker 12 I don't know about the surprising things. I didn't do the whole book on it, but each of you tell me that.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I can go first.

Speaker 14 This is a little tiny detail, but again, one I found surprising, which is

Speaker 14 right around the time that Elon started buying Twitter stock, which was late January of 2022,

Speaker 14 he had complained to CEO Parag Agarwal about the at Elon Jet account and basically said, you need to take this off Twitter. It's following my plane.
It's a privacy thing.

Speaker 14 And Parag essentially ignored Elon. And, you know, within days, weeks, he's buying Twitter shares and two months later, he owns the whole company.

Speaker 14 Now, I'm not saying that's exactly the motivation, but I think the timing is super interesting.

Speaker 14 And I can also say that some people pretty deeply involved in the deal thought that that was a true motivation for him.

Speaker 14 And it's just crazy to think that this $44 billion deal may have started with Elon Jett account.

Speaker 12 And I don't think it's that crazy. I would say that it's a good idea.

Speaker 12 He complained about it to me, actually. Go ahead.

Speaker 14 Oh, and I do think Elon will hold Twitter only because I think to get rid of it would be to admit failure and defeat. And I'm not sure that he'd be willing to do it.

Speaker 14 And as Zoe pointed out, the X AI thing gives him a very logical like pivot into the AI wars. And I think Twitter could be key to that.
So I think he's going to hold on to it.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of small surprising revelations, but one that comes to mind immediately is just the afternoon of deal close when there's been this enormous push and pull over the summer.

Speaker 15 Will he buy the company? Will he not? He's going to sue Twitter. Twitter's going to sue him back.
They're all ready ready to close the deal. All the paperwork is being signed.

Speaker 15 All of the lawyers are at the office. And Elon realizes that he's missing about $500 million and they're short.

Speaker 15 And he asks Twitter if they can loan him the money, essentially, because it's about to be theirs. Twitter says absolutely not.
And they're able to get it anyway.

Speaker 15 But I think it just shows how slapdash the entire process was that even at the 11th hour, they were scrambling trying to get the funding. I agree with everything that you both said.

Speaker 15 And I think too much of his ego is wrapped wrapped up in X to have someone else own and run the company.

Speaker 13 What is the culture or the vibe like at Twitter right now?

Speaker 15 It's a totally different company from the one that it used to be in every way. Like the office literally looks different.
It used to have this kind of like celebratory, multicultural vibe.

Speaker 15 And now it's like...

Speaker 15 more of a spaceship metal kind of the art on the walls looks really different. But I think the people who are there, it's very, very top down now.

Speaker 15 And the people who are there are either completely bought into Elon Musk's vision or they're trapped for visa reasons. But either way, they're pretty scared to talk.

Speaker 15 And there's not a vibe of like open discussion at all anymore.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I was going to say, just the commitment to Elon

Speaker 14 is pretty intense for the people who are still there.

Speaker 14 And like, we're at, we're at the point where most people who, who didn't believe or whatever, that they've been able to jump ship, not all, but most. And so it's just,

Speaker 14 yeah, it's much more hardcore,

Speaker 14 Elon, than it was before, to give Zoe's book a shout out there.

Speaker 12 So. Yeah, excellent.
All right. Thank you, Zoe and Kurt.
I recommend both books, Scott.

Speaker 12 Again, Zoe's book is called Extremely Hardcore, Inside Elon Musk Twitter. And Kurt's book is Battle for the Bird, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 billion fight for Twitter's soul.

Speaker 12 I would say the soul is lost, but I really appreciate that from both of you.

Speaker 14 Thank you, Kara. Thanks, Scott.

Speaker 15 Thanks so much for having us. And we're excited excited for your book as well.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Snooze.

Speaker 12 Oh, stop it. You're not reading any of them, Scott.
So just move along. Anyway, thank you guys so much.
All right, Scott, one more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Speaker 12 Okay, Scott, let's hear some wins and fails. Would you like to go first?

Speaker 13 No, you go first, Cara.

Speaker 12 I would say the win, I thought the Super Bowl was, again, like the Grammys, a real win for entertainment and real people.

Speaker 12 It was lovely. It had a lovely vibe to it.

Speaker 12 And I liked it a lot. And I don't love a sports event.

Speaker 12 And I would say, I got to say, a win goes to Joe Biden's social media manager did a great job. I was really impressed.
I thought it was very funny and tongue-in-cheek.

Speaker 12 And I think they're doing a fantastic job. I don't think it's going to get through to as many people, but I'm glad they're on TikTok, Communist Party and all.

Speaker 12 My fail was Donald, as I said earlier, Donald Trump with NATO. I get there's issues around NATO.
Hello, nice to meet you. So democracy is tough, but

Speaker 12 what he has said is dangerous.

Speaker 12 It's dangerous, especially the signals it's given to someone like Putin. My only non-worry about that is Putin's incompetent.
And as you see, he can't even win in Ukraine. He's a world power.

Speaker 12 So that would be the only thing. But

Speaker 12 to put so many people in harm's way like this is, he should not be president of the United States.

Speaker 12 I get why people want to vote for him. I'm not trying to shame you, but this is to wish for the economy to go down was heinous enough.
This is really, really, really dangerous.

Speaker 12 It's extraordinary. Everyone's world will be crushed economically and if something like this this happens.

Speaker 12 It's an invitation to dictatorship, and it's an invitation to dictators.

Speaker 13 Well, can you imagine how Finland feels?

Speaker 13 Finland, one of the big victories of NATO, the European Union, and the brave Ukrainians and Biden and the EU's coming together around pushing back on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is Finland decided to join NATO.

Speaker 13 How the fuck do they feel right now? They're taking their young men and women and putting them in a NATO uniform, and you're saying that the primary

Speaker 13 and let's be honest, NATO's, for the most part, controlled by the U.S.,

Speaker 13 they're now saying, we're now saying to Finland, who shares an 800-mile border with Russia, the guy that might be president is saying that Putin should attack NATO.

Speaker 12 I mean, anyway, I think. And that's what he said.
Don't say he suggested it. He said it.
He's a transactional fuck is what he is.

Speaker 12 He thinks everything's a real estate deal. And he isn't really that good at real estate either.
So please, it's not real estate. This is not real estate.
These aren't condos in Queens. It's not.

Speaker 12 This guy's wholly unqualified to be the commander in chief, wholly, and dangerous.

Speaker 13 Okay, so my win is I can't help it. I've said, young people, you shouldn't buy, try and find the needle in the haystack.

Speaker 13 You should buy the haystack, buy low-cost ETFs and index funds, but I love stock picking. I think it's fun.

Speaker 13 I think you should take a quarter or maybe even a third year capital and try and find outsized alpha and gains in individual stocks.

Speaker 13 You learn a lot about the markets if you're so inclined, and most people aren't, but if you are.

Speaker 13 But one of my holdings, and I'm talking to my own book here, and it's confirmation bias, but I think there's some logic here.

Speaker 13 I think Airbnb, it's more of a prediction than a win, is going to have a monster earnings at the close of business today. We release on a Tuesday.
I'm still just

Speaker 13 in absolute awe of Meta's earnings. And I'm not an author company.

Speaker 13 I think Mark Zuckerberg, to have all that kind of money and not protect people means he's a boy whose masculinity never took over, and

Speaker 13 his intelligence and his skills have vastly outpaced his empathy and masculinity. I think he's a lost man,

Speaker 13 but the earnings were so striking to

Speaker 13 grow revenues 25%

Speaker 13 and while reducing headcount 25%, I've never seen anything like that. And I tried to suss out

Speaker 13 what are the things that really drove it. And it was one,

Speaker 13 I did it, I looked at, I compiled who are the biggest purchasers or who has the most NVIDIA AI-enabled GPUs on order. And the two biggest are Microsoft and Meta.
They have the most on order.

Speaker 13 And I don't think there's any accident that Microsoft became the most valuable company in the world and Meta just absolutely blew away its numbers. And I was talking to the team today.

Speaker 13 I believe that these GPUs are basically that this moved AI is the equivalent of corporate Ozempic and that it is a gift, it's giving them such incredible efficiency, they can shed weight like they've never before.

Speaker 13 And I was thinking about Airbnb. They also, what else is Meta? Meta is in a consumer space.
Consumer spending is much more robust than people think. It's the biggest player in the space.

Speaker 13 We're moving to an economy. I asked Swat the Motor and on Prop G the other day, and he's like, it's not necessarily a good thing, but size matters, and it keeps increasingly mattering.

Speaker 13 The biggest company in every category is garnering more and more efficiency and more and more market share. Consumer spending vastly outpaced any estimates.
And then

Speaker 13 I think about Airbnb. They bought an AI company in Q3 of last year.
It wasn't a big purchase, but it reflects that Brian is really thinking about AI. They have not been hiring like crazy.

Speaker 13 Unfortunately, there's some unfortunate wins at their back, and that is, I think, young people have sort of, I don't want to say given up on buying a house, but are taking a lot of that money.

Speaker 13 And there's just a different gestalt, the zeitgeist, among young people. If you're in a relationship with someone, you might think, I'm going to go to Bangkok for three months and work remotely.

Speaker 13 And that just feeds right into now, now 20%, I believe, of Airbnb's bookings are for 30 days or longer. Consumer spending is way up.
I think they've embraced AI.

Speaker 13 I think you're looking at a, they're the leader in their space.

Speaker 12 I don't think it's just young people. You know, we're renovating a house and I would look first before looking for something I went to Airbnb.

Speaker 13 And only that, anyone who's anyone who's actually looked at the pricing of Airbnb, I hate to say this, Airbnb has monopoly power. And look at the fees that they're doing.

Speaker 12 Oh, there's VRBO. Yeah, there's VRBO.

Speaker 13 They're pretty good.

Speaker 13 VRBO to Airbnb is what Lyft is to Uber. And that is kind of cute.

Speaker 12 In certain areas, they're good, especially with older people and older. Anyway, yeah, yes.
I like them both. I like them both.

Speaker 13 Anyways, I just think, and this is a prediction, and granted, any disclosure, I own the stock, but I think you're going to see a monster earnings call tonight from Airbnb that's going to surprise everyone to the upside.

Speaker 13 And quite frankly, the market already senses it. The stock's up 7% today.
My fail is I was really moved and shocked by, I mean, I shocked.

Speaker 13 Shocked, but not surprised. Someone put out this Instagram reel with Julia Roberts talking about this picture with her niece.

Speaker 12 Did you see this? Yeah, she looked adorable. Am I Roberts?

Speaker 13 This is so cute. She's with her niece, cute thing, playing cards in the morning.

Speaker 12 They look adorable.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And there are literally hundreds of comments about how she's not aging well.
And look how shitty she looks, talking about what's failed, sur just really going after her looks.

Speaker 13 And I thought to myself, okay.

Speaker 13 If one of the most beautiful women in history

Speaker 13 gets attacked like this, what are the chances that our daughters get to their 30s?

Speaker 12 And she made this point. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And I really appreciate her saying that.

Speaker 12 Yeah, she made a very big point of it. Good for her.

Speaker 13 She came out swinging. She said, this is just such bullshit.

Speaker 13 And I thought, and here's the thing: fairly or unfairly, the reality is women are disproportionately evaluated based on their parents, and men are disproportionately evaluated based on their economic

Speaker 13 well-being, economic prosperity. You would never say to a man, you are so weak and such a failure and have so few skills, you will not be able to take care of your kids.

Speaker 13 You would never say that to a man.

Speaker 13 You would never go on social media and say, I have observed you and you will never be able to take care of your children. You would think that is, you would, that is a low blow.

Speaker 13 You would never say that, but it's open season on women's look.

Speaker 12 I agree. I liked what she had to say.
She was clear-headed in doing it. I have to say, dunkery has really got, I've about had it with dunking.

Speaker 12 Like, I don't mind if it's at like big famous people and some of it's funny.

Speaker 12 I like it when it's funny and not so righteous, but the righteousness and the ability just to say nasty shit out loud is really, it's a disease of Trump. It's a disease of Trump.
I'm a sexist.

Speaker 13 I make fun of men's looks. I objectify them.
With women, with women, you don't make fun of their looks. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Oh, I agree. I don't think you should make fun of anyone's looks, but yeah.

Speaker 13 Our society disproportionately evaluates women and young women especially are told that their entire net worth, their self-esteem, unfortunately, should come from their looks.

Speaker 13 You would never walk into a restaurant and start and see someone famous and go, Jesus Christ, you're aging poorly. You would never say that.
It's not a free speech issue.

Speaker 13 And then the thing that was really unfortunate about it is a lot of these comments, you can tell, are from men.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And it's just

Speaker 12 welcome to Gamergate. This is

Speaker 13 did your mother teach you anything?

Speaker 13 So, and everyone goes to, well, it's free speech. It's great about the internet.
You would never behave this way. You would never go on Twitter and say to a young man, you can't speak English.

Speaker 13 Your logic is so poor, you will never be able to take care of your children because you'll be such an economic failure. You would never say that.

Speaker 12 You wouldn't.

Speaker 13 Anyway, so

Speaker 13 my fail is social media has given mostly men license to really attack

Speaker 13 just in a...

Speaker 13 This is the opposite of masculinity. These guys think that they're being tough.
You move to protection.

Speaker 13 And women are especially sensitive because our society disproportionately evaluates them based on their looks. And it's not right, but it is.
No man should ever disparage a woman's looks, ever.

Speaker 13 My win goes to Julia Roberts for speaking out and clapping back.

Speaker 13 I thought it was a nice moment for her to say, you know what?

Speaker 13 Yeah, what are you thinking?

Speaker 12 What are you thinking? Are you

Speaker 12 thinking about raising? When someone comes at me with, oh, it's my free speech, I'm like, fine, but you're an asshole. Like, that's what you are.
You're an asshole. That's simply what you are.

Speaker 12 Anyway, speaking of relationships and men and women together, Scott and I went on Esther Perel's podcast, Where Should We Begin for some Couples Counseling? Because we love each other so deeply.

Speaker 12 You'll be able to hear the entire session next week. And here's a little tease.

Speaker 19 Sometimes people present themselves as tough.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 19 But for the purpose of covering taking often is a very tender, yes, gentle.

Speaker 12 I think you're talking about me. I am actually tough, but I also can be tender.
It's okay to be tough.

Speaker 19 I mean, we've met maybe three or four times that we have spoken together. I don't think of you as tough, but I do sometimes think you can be intimidating.

Speaker 19 Which Scott, who presents as tough, doesn't intimidate me at all.

Speaker 12 Whereas

Speaker 13 literally, our narcissism knows no bounds.

Speaker 12 I know, it's true, but it was good. Anyway, that'll drop in the Pivot feed on Tuesday, February 20th.
It's very enjoyable.

Speaker 13 That's what the world needs. More Scott and Kara.

Speaker 12 Anyway, we want to hear from you, by the way. Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind.
Go to nymag.com slash pivot to submit a question for the show or call 8-5551-PIVOT.

Speaker 12 Scott, that is the show. We'll be back on Friday for more.
What an enjoyable show. Once again, I love our relationship.
I love our relationship. Read us out.

Speaker 13 Today's show is produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Intertot Intertot engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miles Severo.

Speaker 13 Nishak Kurua is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 13 You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/slash pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

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