Elon Musk’s Thousands of Posts Reveal His Political Evolution

[00:00:18] [SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, August 28th. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street

[00:00:24] [SPEAKER_03]: Journal. Chipmaker NVIDIA reports its second quarter earnings today. We'll tell you what

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_03]: investors will be looking for. And then, Elon Musk tweets. A lot. A new journal analysis

[00:00:38] [SPEAKER_03]: shows how the content of his posts have shifted focus from his businesses to politics. Our

[00:00:43] [SPEAKER_03]: reporter Alexa Korras will join us to explain what the posts reveal about the political

[00:00:48] [SPEAKER_03]: evolution of one of the world's richest men.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_03]: We're starting with NVIDIA, which reports its earnings after the markets closed today.

[00:01:04] [SPEAKER_03]: The chipmaker has been one of the biggest winners of the artificial intelligence boom. But some

[00:01:10] [SPEAKER_03]: big questions hang over the company's future, including when its next generation AI chips,

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_03]: known as Blackwell, will launch. The chipmaker told customers that Blackwell chips will

[00:01:20] [SPEAKER_03]: be delayed by several months, according to a person familiar with conversations

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_03]: between NVIDIA and cloud companies. NVIDIA said in a statement that the production

[00:01:29] [SPEAKER_03]: of the chips is on track to ramp in the second half of the year.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_03]: Here to tell us more is our reporter Asa Fitch. So Asa, how important are Blackwell

[00:01:38] [SPEAKER_03]: chips to NVIDIA's future?

[00:01:40] [SPEAKER_04]: So Blackwell is the next generation chip architecture that NVIDIA has coming out.

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_04]: And these transitions in chip architecture have a big impact. They basically mean

[00:01:51] [SPEAKER_04]: that you can do things faster, you can do more computations. You just have a

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_04]: more powerful piece of silicon with more transistors to do more things with. So

[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_04]: it's pretty important in the medium term for the company and for people

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_04]: developing AI systems like OpenAI and Google and Microsoft and Amazon, etc.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_03]: So what are analysts expecting from NVIDIA's earnings?

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Analysts are expecting the company to post earnings of more than $28 billion

[00:02:16] [SPEAKER_04]: for the quarter. That would be more than double what it did the same

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_04]: quarter the previous year. And the expectation is for a further increase in

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_04]: the company's revenue and profits in the current quarter that's going on

[00:02:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Expectations are very high for NVIDIA and it has set a precedent of always doing

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_04]: very, very well compared to expectations.

[00:02:38] [SPEAKER_03]: Asa, apart from investors, why does the market care about NVIDIA's results?

[00:02:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, it's kind of a litmus tester. It's become a litmus test of the strength of the AI boom.

[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_04]: NVIDIA's chips are basically the computational workhorses of this boom,

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_04]: or they have been so far. It has 80 or 90 percent market share in AI chips.

[00:02:54] [SPEAKER_04]: And so the sales of those chips mean either companies like Google and

[00:03:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Microsoft, etc. are buying them or they're not buying them. And if they

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_04]: aren't buying them then that's concerning for the AI boom. If they're

[00:03:08] [SPEAKER_04]: buying more of them then it suggests that there's more to come. These

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_04]: companies, these big tech companies have all reported results in the past

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_04]: month or so and they've said that their capital spending plans are still

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_04]: very high. They intend to spend more and more money on AI. So the feeling is

[00:03:23] [SPEAKER_04]: that likely those moves will filter into strong results for NVIDIA, but of

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_04]: course we'll see when it happens.

[00:03:31] [SPEAKER_03]: So how should we expect changes in AI interest and concerns about the

[00:03:35] [SPEAKER_03]: profitability of some of these AI startups to impact NVIDIA?

[00:03:39] [SPEAKER_04]: Certainly there's been a lot of investment in AI chips. There hasn't been a ton of

[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_04]: revenue and profits from the use of those chips to produce AI systems.

[00:03:49] [SPEAKER_04]: People actually using them and paying for them. You know there have been

[00:03:52] [SPEAKER_04]: billions of profits but there's been hundreds of billions spent on these chips.

[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Analysts don't think that that concern is going to weigh on NVIDIA's results

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_04]: in the near term, but it's certainly something that in the long term people

[00:04:04] [SPEAKER_04]: are really paying attention to.

[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Alright that's our reporter Asa Fitch. Thanks for joining us Asa.

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Thanks.

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_03]: For more of your daily tech headlines check out TNB Tech Minute.

[00:04:14] [SPEAKER_03]: That's right here in the tech news briefing feed. Coming up, Elon Musk

[00:04:19] [SPEAKER_03]: in 300,000 of his own words will tell you what the journal analysis of his

[00:04:24] [SPEAKER_03]: posts on X reveals about the billionaires turn to politics.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_03]: That's after the break.

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_01]: Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash wall street oracle.com slash wall street.

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_03]: In 2019 Elon Musk tweeted mostly about his companies and the occasional joke.

[00:05:16] [SPEAKER_03]: Flash forward five and a half years and the platform once called Twitter is now

[00:05:20] [SPEAKER_03]: called X following Musk's takeover and the content of Musk's posts has also changed.

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_03]: To understand that shift the Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 42,000 of Musk's

[00:05:33] [SPEAKER_03]: exchanges on X between 2019 and the end of July.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_03]: Our reporter Alexa Kors joins us now.

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Alexa you and the team that worked on this you created this sort of cloud that

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_03]: depicts all of Musk's different posts.

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_03]: Can you describe that to us?

[00:05:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah so what we did was we used AI like things similar to a chat GPT like

[00:05:54] [SPEAKER_02]: tool to classify posts around certain categories.

[00:05:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And so what was cool from that when you look at 2019 we could see like clusters

[00:06:04] [SPEAKER_02]: about Tesla and SpaceX and like how his companies were such a big focus then.

[00:06:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Then if you go and look at the 2024 cluster,

[00:06:13] [SPEAKER_02]: you see a ton of tweets kind of on the other side of the map.

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And that reflects that Elon is now tweeting so much more about politics.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_02]: What I thought was really striking is just how much more he's posting now.

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_02]: This year through July, Musk had already posted about 13,000 posts.

[00:06:32] [SPEAKER_03]: So in 2019 Musk is posting mostly about his companies.

[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_03]: When do things start to change?

[00:06:37] [SPEAKER_02]: In the story we identified a few key turning points.

[00:06:41] [SPEAKER_02]: There's the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns and

[00:06:47] [SPEAKER_02]: That really frustrated Musk because it interfered with his Tesla factory in

[00:06:51] [SPEAKER_02]: Fremont and in 2021 you see him clashing with the Biden administration.

[00:06:58] [SPEAKER_02]: In 2022 that's when he buys Twitter and

[00:07:01] [SPEAKER_02]: he really starts talking a lot about free speech.

[00:07:04] [SPEAKER_03]: So how has Musk's stance on free speech appeared in posts and

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_03]: what reaction has that elicited?

[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we see free speech really jump and

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_02]: become a much bigger focus of his around 2022.

[00:07:17] [SPEAKER_02]: He's talking a lot about free speech.

[00:07:19] [SPEAKER_02]: He asked his followers on Twitter,

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_02]: do you think Twitter follows free speech?

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_02]: That leads to him taking it over.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Of course now Twitter is X and these moves really win him a lot of fans

[00:07:31] [SPEAKER_02]: among conservatives this sense that the platform had not been friendly to

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_02]: conservative voices and obviously it's much different under his stewardship.

[00:07:41] [SPEAKER_03]: What political and social issues does he start to wade into?

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Just to give a few examples, there's woke like this catch all for

[00:07:49] [SPEAKER_02]: liberal policies about diversity and other issues.

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_02]: He tweets about international issues like Ukraine.

[00:07:56] [SPEAKER_02]: He tweets a lot about domestic issues that concern him like illegal immigration.

[00:08:02] [SPEAKER_02]: And then of course recently we've seen him come out and

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_02]: endorse Donald Trump for president and

[00:08:07] [SPEAKER_02]: be very vocal about the presidential election coming up.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_03]: When do we see his focus turn towards former President Trump and President Biden?

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Around 2021, we start to see Musk is not getting along with the Biden administration.

[00:08:24] [SPEAKER_02]: They're having some disagreements about Tesla,

[00:08:27] [SPEAKER_02]: about unions and Tesla is not unionized.

[00:08:30] [SPEAKER_02]: And from there in subsequent years,

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_02]: we've started to see him posting more and more about Biden, about Trump.

[00:08:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And that really hit its peak this summer where we see Musk has come out and

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_02]: endorsed Trump and he recently had a live conversation with Trump on X and

[00:08:46] [SPEAKER_02]: he's being very vocal about the race.

[00:08:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Did Musk answer any of the WSJ's questions about his posting patterns?

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_02]: So I reached out to Musk and people who worked for him with questions about

[00:08:58] [SPEAKER_02]: his posting habits and I didn't hear back.

[00:09:01] [SPEAKER_03]: Why does it matter what Musk posts on X?

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_02]: X is like his megaphone.

[00:09:06] [SPEAKER_02]: He has almost 200 million followers on there.

[00:09:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Another thing that I just thought was really interesting is usually with CEOs,

[00:09:14] [SPEAKER_02]: you get a lot of very formal statements.

[00:09:17] [SPEAKER_02]: You don't usually hear from them in unscripted way.

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of the opposite with Musk.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_02]: He posts so much that I felt like it was really interesting to just take a

[00:09:25] [SPEAKER_02]: step back and realize wow, look at how much has changed in just a few years.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_02]: And we're able to see that thanks to how much he's sharing online.

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_03]: That was our reporter, Alexa Kors.

[00:09:37] [SPEAKER_03]: And that's it for tech news briefing.

[00:09:39] [SPEAKER_03]: Today's show was produced by Zoe Kolkin with supervising producer Katherine

[00:09:43] [SPEAKER_03]: Millsop. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal.

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_03]: We'll be back this afternoon with TNV Tech Minute.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for listening.

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