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Andrew Ross Sorkin first started writing for The New York Times when he was just 18 years old. He’s come a long way in the years since, and now dons an extraordinary number of hats: He’s the founder and editor at large of DealBook, the paper’s flagship business newsletter, a perch from which he also hosts its buzzy conferences; he’s the co-host of CNBC’s influential morning show Squawk Box; he’s the author of Too Big to Fail, a bestselling, defining book about the 2008 financial crisis; and he co-created the hit TV show Billions.

Lately, with tech titans and CEOs factoring in more than ever to a presidential election awash with more cash and commentary than ever before, Sorkin has been in the headlines for breaking news and news-breaking interviews.

There was last year’s infamous sit-down with Elon Musk, where the world’s richest man and proprietor of X, formerly Twitter, instructed the advertisers he needs to keep his business afloat to “go fuck” themselves.

Then there’s Squawk Box, which Sorkin hosts alongside Joe Kernen and Becky Quick, where heated disagreements between the hosts are not uncommon and often go viral on social media.

“It’s like going to dinner with your family at Thanksgiving,” Sorkin told Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club. “I learn and I

think the audience learns. Because you’re not just being told one thing over and over again.”

“I just relish the idea of having a great conversation, especially when it’s focused on ideas,” he added. “I don’t love when it gets personal.”

Sorkin reflected on his interview with Musk and what he makes of the billionaire’s stewardship of X in the year since. “I could feel in that moment that this was coming from a dark place,” Sorkin said of the interview. “There was an anger and frustration. I was concerned at that moment about bringing the interview back.”

Sorkin isn’t as bearish on X as some of his colleagues in the media. Yes, the company has seen its value plummet thanks in no small part to Musk’s erratic and controversial leadership.

Yet Sorkin is impressed by xAI, Musk’s AI play, which learns from content on the X platform. “I wonder in the end, when people say, did X work? The bull case would be, what does work mean? X may turn into some kind of training tool for his AI agent in the end.” If its value comes anywhere close to competitors like OpenAI, Musk will have turned Twitter into an enormous success.

Sorkin describes himself as apolitical, and tries to remain so in his reporting. Yet he conceded it’s increasingly hard to do so in recent years. “This whole business has

become so much harder because I think 20 years ago, when people came on TV, they came in good faith trying to tell the truth. Now it seems like people come on television, and make public pronouncements and statements that are just not in good faith.”

He also spoke about his optimism for the future of the media business, if Silicon Valley really has turned MAGA, and what Fortune 500 CEOs think of Vice President Kamala Harris versus Trump.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full on Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: You’re at CNBC and The New York Times. What is your outlook on the future of legacy media, and specifically these two institutions, one which has figured out how to make a profit in the digital space, and another which, like all cable news networks, faces the looming linear cliff.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: Get out your salt shaker, if you will, take this with a grain of salt. I wouldn’t be working for these institutions if I was not a believer. I started at The New York Times when I was 18 years old. I’m 47 years old now. I’ve been hosting the show on CNBC since 2011, and I think I became a contributor to the

network back in 2006, and was on NBC back in 2002. So it has been a long time together. I am convinced, and you can call me crazy, but I would argue The New York Times has already flipped the page in terms of where the digital piece of this can all go. Because I think it’s clearly working. I think anyone who’s watching will have seen that already. It has been quite a spectacular and remarkable rise.

Do you worry that it’s a monopoly? That it will only work for The New York Times?

It’s not that I worry that it’s a monopoly. I don’t think it’s a monopoly. I think we get news now in so many different ways from so many different places. I think there’s a question mark about how many news institutions, if you will, can exist in this environment and how many can exist where people are paying for them. I think this is very similar, by the way, to what you’re seeing in streaming. So if you have Netflix and you have Peacock and you have Paramount and Hulu and Disney, I think there’s a question as to how many everyone’s subscribed to. I do think that it’s not going to be the old days. Unfortunately, I don’t think every town and every city can even necessarily

support a full paper. But I do think there’s more news than there’s ever been. I worry about certain types of news, certain types of investigative kind of work, accountability kind of work in the town halls of small towns, trying to make sure that good things happen. That’s my concern. From an economics perspective, how do you make the math of that work?

Right.

I think that’s still an open question. I also think, though, and The New York Times is doing some of this work, but there are others as well who are trying to find new models to try to support that kind of work. So I am not a doomsayer. I believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

On the cable news side of things: linear is declining as an industry, with cord cutting, etc. All of these companies are going to have to make the jump to streaming at a certain point. The streaming model, as of now, is just far less profitable than the linear model is. How does cable news survive?

I would go back to two things. One is, everybody’s been calling for the death of the bundle forever. I actually think the bundle is stronger than people imagine. We’re at 65, 68 million homes in America today. And some people say it’s going to fall in half. I’m not so sure

that that’s true. I think that it’s going to continue to fall for some period of time. But I also am starting to see and you’re seeing it, the re-bundling of everything. And so, was there a period of time where there were too many channels and too many shows? Sure. I’m not so sure that’s true in the news business, though. There really are only a handful, you can count them practically on one hand, of “news” channels. And so, is there a market for those channels? Yes. But I also would say that there’s more news happening in all sorts of other ways. We’re doing it right now [gestures at Mediaite’s studio]. This did not exist a decade ago.

And then, you think to yourself, the cost of production. I remember when I first started doing this, if you had to travel somewhere, there was a truck, a physical satellite truck. If I was flying somewhere, there was not just the camera people, it was like a traveling circus. And that was very expensive. Today, you can get a live view box, which is basically a transmitter, that you can put in a backpack, and grab a camera, and go. And so I happen to think all of these things are going to work themselves out in ways that maybe less optimistic folks don’t believe.

That the

costs are going to shrink a little bit.

That the costs are going to shrink a lot a bit.

You co-host Squawk Box with Joe Kernen and Becky Quick. It’s a great show and has been making a lot of news lately. You’ve hosted the show since 2011. What time are you waking up for that, 4 a.m.?

A little later. I shouldn’t admit this. In morning TV Land, I think you’re supposed to say you wake up at like 2:30 in the morning. I remember George Stephanopoulos, I think wakes up at 1:30 in the morning, and does meditation, and does the gym and all of that. I don’t do any of those things. I wake up and I race to the studio.

5:59, you roll out of bed, straight to the studio, SquawkBox at 6.

The show starts at 5:59.

5:58 then, sorry, excuse me.

Well sometimes there’s traffic, there’s lights, sometimes a garbage truck or a fire truck in the morning. These are all real issues.

So you’re happy to keep doing it?

Yes.

You love it?

Love it. I get to wake up every morning and effectively have breakfast with some of the most interesting people in the world. It’s oftentimes, by the way, the most interesting time in their life, meaning when you get to interview these people, it’

s either at oftentimes the highs in their life, or the lows in their life. What could be more interesting than that? And so a lot of people are reading the newspaper in the morning, or scrolling through the newspaper in the morning, and I feel like I get to sit there with the people who are oftentimes making the news in that. And I get to ask them all the questions that everybody else has in the morning as they’re scrolling through the news.

What I also like about it, and I don’t want to gas you up too much here…

You can go for it, please.

A lot of morning television involves a lot of partisan bloviating. Which is why Squawk Box is my favorite morning show.

God bless you. How much do we owe you?

It’s substantive. It’s interesting. And one of the things that makes it compelling, and I want you to be very honest with me here about this dynamic, is you often disagree with your co-hosts.

Yes.

And it can get tense.

It sometimes does.

You and Joe Kernen in particular are often diametrically opposed on an issue.

Absolutely.

How do you make that work?

First of all, I learn from Joe a lot. Because he has a perspective that I don’t often have. But understanding that perspective is super important. So we don’t agree on everything. I actually think we

probably agree on a lot more than maybe you think we would agree on. It’s probably like going to dinner with your family at Thanksgiving. There’s going to be different people with different ideas, and we get to play them out, if you will, every morning. And you do get to see different perspectives. I learn from Becky every morning too. Everyone’s got a little bit of a different frame on the world in a way. And that, to me, is actually kind of fun, even though, yes, it does create disagreement sometimes. But I think overall for me, as I said, I learn and I think the audience learns. Because you get to see, hopefully, all the sides. You’re not just being told one thing over and over again.

This week, there was the clash over Truth Social, where I think he thought that you were trying to push him to criticize Trump’s company.

In truth on that one, I just thought we glossed over it so quickly. We did the headline and we moved on to something else. And I thought, you know what? Given how much it’d fallen, it’s probably worth lingering on this for a moment. Again, genuinely not as a political argument. But just because we hadn’t actually talked about it in a while, and here we were talking about where the stock was. So that was my feeling.

He may have taken it as a political piece. But that’s the fun of it.

The other one was on Tuesday, when you discussed Trump being found liable for sexual abuse in the case of E. Jean Carroll. Do you relish in having those kinds of disagreements, even when it can get tense between you and Joe?

I enjoy talking about ideas. I like when we are debating ideas. And that could be about tax policy. That could be about regulations, that could be about immigration, all sorts of issues. So I think I just relish the idea of having a great conversation, especially when it’s focused on ideas. I don’t love when it gets personal.

Don’t love when it gets personal.

No, because nobody likes that.

Does it ever carry on off the air?

No, for the most part. We were texting this afternoon.

And it wasn’t, ‘I hate you’?

No, no, no. We were texting about tomorrow.

I heard you once describe yourself as genuinely apolitical.

Yes. Which is hard.

Has it gotten harder? We do live in an age where people find it harder to be apolitical, and as balanced as they were when our politics were a little more normal.

This is the question about apolitical or not. Just hear me out, and you can tell me I’m totally crazy. So I think that I am apolitical in that I don’

t think that I’m a political animal. I don’t think I actually have a particular dog in the hunt, per se. I’m not always rooting for one party over another or think that one party’s ideas are somehow meaningfully better than another. There are things I agree with and disagree with. But you’d be shocked to think that I am closer to the center, if you will than you perceive.

Joe always likes to say, where you sit is where you think you are. Everybody thinks they’re in the center. And so the issue about being apolitical is, I do think of myself as a journalist first. Therefore, I’m into truth. And so I think it gets complicated when you’re covering politics and it feels like the politicians are not telling the truth. And I think it’s uniquely complicated when, in this case, when former President Trump doesn’t tell the truth, it’s sometimes an obvious lie, it could be sunny outside, he would tell you it’s raining, you know it’s not true.

By the way, Democrats lie too. And maybe their lives are even more insidious in some ways, because you don’t really know, and they don’t really tell you. And if I was gonna take the other side, I’d say, look, think about Joe Biden and Joe Biden&

#8217;s health, and how long nobody wanted to tell anybody that he might have an issue. And is that a more insidious lie than some of these other guys? Maybe it is. And by the way, clearly people who are on one side of the political aisle think that. But yes, if you’re trying to be a journalist that is just after truth, I think this whole business has become so much harder, in part because, maybe this is not true, but I think 20 years ago, or at least I tell myself, that when people came on TV, they came in good faith trying to tell the truth.

And there was a shame if you were caught not telling the truth.

And now it seems like people come on television, make public pronouncements and statements that are just not in good faith. What are you supposed to do about that?

How do you as an anchor…

Badly. How do we deal with it? Badly.

There’s this roaring debate now about how much we’re supposed to fact-check people. I think the the Sunday show hosts probably get it the worst, because they’re constantly browbeaten by social media to aggressively fact-check Trump supporters about the 2020 election. And I probably agree with that. You probably shouldn’t allow someone to just lie to your face and to your viewers about an election. From your perch at CNBC, how

do you approach that?

I think we try, to the extent we can, to fact-check in real-time. I think that should be a goal. I think what’s hard is if you do happen to have a guest that is lying in real-time, and doing it with such frequency that every other sentence requires a fact-check, that’s very, very hard. Sometimes we’ll come back on the air later and say, by the way, so-and-so mentioned X, just wanted to let the audience know that’s not true.

But there’s a flipside to all of this. It’s not about fact-checking so much as sometimes, and I think there’s actually a magic of TV that’s different than the magic of print, which is the audience gets to see it all themselves. Let’s say someone doesn’t answer a question. We see you evading the question, and then you think it’s your responsibility as the journalist to re-ask the question until they answer the question. But in a very interesting way, and this is what is very interesting about TV and different than other mediums, the audience gets to see the answer. The answer may be unsatisfying. The answer may be evasive, but that is the answer. And you got to see that. And that’s actually very valuable in a way that, for example,

when I’m writing, you get no comment, and you write down no comment. The reader doesn’t really get to see what was the facial expression. And they get to read in, and project onto that no comment all sorts of things. Look, all of this is a balance.

I want to ask you about Elon Musk and your interview with him at DealBook. He told advertisers on X, who he needs to keep revenues flowing to the platform, unless the subscription play is really working out, to go f themselves. What went through your mind when he said that?

A whole bunch of things went through my mind. But the truth is, I was concerned in that moment about bringing the interview back, actually, because if you were really watching him, and I spent many years covering him and have known him and reported on him for many years, and I could feel in that moment that this was coming from a dark place. There was an anger and frustration. And you could just see where this could go. And so the truth is, as he was saying that, I’m sure that other people were like, my God, that was amazing. I can’t believe he said that, or were thinking, we just made 100 headlines and how do I keep making 100 headlines? That’s not really what I was thinking in that moment. I was thinking, I need to meet

this man where he is right this moment, and he needs to see me. I need to see him. We need to get to the same place so that we can continue this conversation. When he made those comments, it was probably within five, ten minutes of the interview, which is likely to go on for an hour, maybe for an hour and a half. There were so many different topics that I was hoping to get to and I didn’t want the train to go off the track.

Right.

And so to me, in that moment, that’s what I was actually thinking. The other thing I was thinking was, when I go into an interview like that with somebody like that, what I was hoping to do was create, frankly, a number of moments where you got to see Elon, the various different pieces of Elon, the different versions of Elon, and I think Walter Isaacson writes in his book that there’s 4 or 5 different Elons. Part of what I was trying to do was create an environment where you could see all these various Elons, because all of them are fascinating. I’m also a believer, whether you like him or you don’t like him, that if you get to see him and understand him in a very raw and visceral way, you can understand him and you can try to understand where this is all coming from,

what this is really all about. And I think there’s so many other things in that interview, in fact, that I’m so happy and proud that we were able to dive into, issues that oftentimes get overshadowed by that moment. I was hoping we would be able to get to all of these different places. I was, in a way, hoping we got to that kind of moment. Not necessarily in that way, but I thought if we did, it was going to come towards the end of the interview. I didn’t know how it would emerge. I would say you’re a little bit like a pilot. You’re starting at JFK, you’re ending it at LAX, you’re stopping at O’Hare and Denver and maybe Dallas. But the weather’s going to change. And so how you get there is likely to move around a little bit.

He took you to Anchorage within minute five.

So, yeah, we we took a little detour. And then the question was, how do we get back back on track?

What do you make of his stewardship of X, formerly Twitter? Are you worried about what’s become of the platform?

Oh goodness. I have so many mixed views of it. I actually think the technological back end of the product is a better product than it used to be. I actually think the actual physical product,

it loads faster, there’s better functionality. There’s a lot of things that I think the actual product is a better product for. What concerns me is I used to think that there was a lot of different voices on X, maybe I was wrong about this, but I thought there were voices on all sides and you could really capture everybody. It doesn’t feel that way to me as much. It feels like it’s definitely taken a rightward turn. And a lot of the stuff that I see, both in the folks that I call, the people I follow, I would say many of them don’t post as much or as often. So I use the For You page and a lot of that stuff is, maybe it’s the stuff I’m clicking on, because it’s interesting.

I’m getting a lot of Nazi tweets on the For You page, which is tough.

I’ll get Jew Boy, I’ll get stuff that’s not great, but I don’t get it all the time.

And it hasn’t gotten worse?

For me, it hasn’t. I get stuff every single day. Crazy things. My DMs, and I’ve almost inured to it. And maybe I shouldn’t be. What I don’t know is where everybody has gone. Are they on Threads?

Threads is

a bit of a graveyard. I know that there are a lot of people that use Threads that like Threads. I’ve had people on this show that swear by Threads. I’ve tried to use Threads.

Are they on Instagram? I find myself more addicted to Instagram these days, just in terms of, if I have to scroll, that’s where I do a lot of scrolling. I’m obviously not learning the same kinds of things because it’s just different. It’s a whole different kind of thing. It’s not as newsy.

There was a tweet a couple of years ago from Elon Musk where he said that Twitter can only survive and thrive as a platform if it promotes both the right and the left equally. And if those voices are both on the platform, and I think definitely over the course of the last two years, at least, it’s skewed totally to the right.

Totally skewed to the right. There’s a real question, can he make a business of that?

Right. Can it be profitable?

That’s a legitimate question. It’s not only can it be profitable, it’s can it ever reach the value that it had beforehand. $44 billion. I’m sure there are people who dislike Elon and dislike Twitter, and would love for me to say that this whole thing is terrible for the

universe. I do worry about people getting their own echo chamber. That’s a real problem. But by the way, it’s also a problem on all these platforms. And it’s a problem if you think the right is in their own echo chamber, the left is in its own echo chamber. So that’s a problem across the board.

What I was going to say that I am fascinated by, and I don’t think he’s getting enough credit for, frankly, is xAI, his AI effort, which, by the way, is dependent largely on learning from a lot of the content that’s on X, it’s come up super fast. It is really, really good. Open AI, Chat-GBT I think is at the top, and then Anthropic and Google are vying for the next place in all this. By the way, Llama, which is a Meta product, amazing, people don’t talk about it enough, it’s an open-source AI product that’s come on super fast. But for a guy who basically started this a year ago and people are now talking about it with Open AI. And I’ll play with it. It’s pretty good. It’s not there yet. I don’t want to oversell it, but I think it’s pretty interesting. And so I wonder in the end, when people say, did

X work? The bull case would be what does work mean? It may turn into some kind of training tool for his AI agent in the end.

And as OpenAI is valued at $150 billion, it might not be such a bad thing to have.

Look, if xAI turns into something that’s even worth $50 Billion…

It’s more than the value that Twitter was when he bought it.

Right.

Looking forward to the the 2024 election, Elon Musk was at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania over the weekend. He said that this election, if Trump does not win, will be our last. What did you make of those comments?

So I watched that, and I don’t know if I flinched, but I clocked that. I clocked that moment because he was effectively turning the threat to democracy argument that the Democrats have made around Trump on its head, saying there will be no election.

Which is a Trump tactic dating back decades.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to measure this as a political tactic. I don’t like this kind of language, but I don’t like this kind of language necessarily across the board. It feels like, and I don’t want to be biased, because the country lived through January 6th, and there has been real, legitimate people who have come forward who said that there was an effort to undermine the

credibility of the election and the election result, and we know that, that feels like there’s a better basis to say that democracy is on the line then to suggest that if Vice President Harris becomes the president, that there will never be another election again. I believe, in fairness to Elon, that his perspective on this is that the Democrats have runaway immigration, that they are going to allow all sorts of people to vote without any kind of identification, and that one day, therefore, you’ll never need to have a true election. I assume that’s the logic train. I don’t agree with that necessarily.

Now, this election, I’d say, is the first time that we’ve seen a real shift in how the tech world and Silicon Valley is voting. I don’t know what the numbers are right now, but I think in the past, Silicon Valley voted 80% for Democrats. And this year, there’s been this big wave of tech figures, VCs have thrown their weight behind Trump, and a lot of them have cast themselves as sort of populists and anti-establishment figures who are supporting Trump because he represents a political figure who’s going to take on the elite.

Right.

The counterargument is that that’s a cynical argument, that these are the most elite people in America, and that what they’re really doing is

supporting Trump because he’s going to deregulate industries that they have money in. What do you think explains the shift of people in the tech world supporting Donald Trump in 2024?

Don’t hate me for saying this. I don’t know if it’s as big a shift as has been described.

It’s just a lot of very loud people?

Lot of loud people. Peter Thiel was always a libertarian. Most of the venture capital community in Silicon Valley had this sort of libertarian strain among them. And that libertarian strain oftentimes meant that they were actually voting in favor of Republicans. And you could say they were closet Republicans, whatever you want to say. The rank-and-file, the engineers that are coding at Google and at Facebook were long-time Democrats. That’s what was going on.

I don’t know if that dynamic has changed just because Chamath Palihapitiya might have shifted, that’s why I’m not sure that it’s actually that different. Marc Andreessen, I think he was always a libertarian conservative person. I don’t think that this is some monumental shift. I think this is not a big distinction. Ben Horowitz, his partner, who obviously shifted originally towards Trump away from Biden, and now apparently is giving money to Harris because they had a longstanding relationship and friendship prior. So, yeah, I get it. But I don’

t know if it’s a massive change.

You speak with a lot of these people and a lot of CEOs. What’s your sense about the general feeling about the 2024 election? What are you hearing from them, in terms of either what a Kamala Harris presidency or a Donald Trump presidency means for the country and for the economy?

I’ve said this on TV, so I apologize for not being totally original. The thing I hear from CEOs, putting aside the country in a very selfish way, is they think about themselves. A lot of them say that they lived in terror between 2016 and 2020. Because they feared they were going to wake up to a tweetstorm about them and their company, because the president had woken up and decided that there was something amiss about the business and how it was counter to him in some way. I think that’s a real thing that very much consumes a lot of the Fortune 500 sort of business community, which is to say, what would really happen here?

You think more would be speaking out if they weren’t scared?

I think they are completely, completely petrified. There is no upside to talking in favor, necessarily, of Vice President Harris, or speaking out in any way against former President Trump.

Disney learned the hard way.

I think actually Ron DeSantis taught a lesson to the business community. I don’t wanna

say taught a lesson, but created a lesson that has scared the business community, which is that some of these politicians will actually do things to hurt you in a real and meaningful way. And so how you speak about these things is a real thing. So I think there’s a fear there. A lot of them, I will say, like conceptually the policies of Trump more than they do Harris, or they don’t know. Their view of regulation and the FTC and Lina Khan and the Department of Justice allowing certain types of mergers to go through, or what the corporate tax rates are going to be, or even immigration, they want those issues dealt with.

And I don’t think that they necessarily have huge confidence that she’s going to do a tremendous job at that necessarily next month. I’ll tell you what a CEO said to me, maybe a week or two ago. He said, well, it’s like a Delta-Beta situation. She could turn out to be good, to fine, but I don’t think you’d ever describe her as bad. He, they think, could, in an optimistic view, be great, maybe it turns out to be absolutely fabulous. But it could also turn out to be absolutely horrific. And so the question is which ride you want to go on. I think that’s part of it. And I think

there’s a lot of people, those who are supporting former President Trump, that genuinely believe that’s worth the risk, because they believe in these other things, and they’re willing to take the chance, because they think that whatever the Biden administration and Vice President Harris represent in their mind is no great shakes.

There’s zero risk in supporting Donald Trump because if he wins the election, he’s going to favor you. He’s not going to punish you. Whereas if you come out against him, you’re obviously in the crosshairs.

But, look, I would also say if you support him, you could still be in the crosshairs later. Mike Pence will tell you about that.

Whether Kamala Harris wins or Donald Trump wins, what does it mean for the future of the media industry?

I’m going to be excoriated for this answer.

Keep the cameras rolling.

I would bet from a pure media, eyeballs, readership way, and this is what I think Jeff Zucker might have said back in the day…

Or a certain CBS chief who will not be named.

Was it Les Moonves who said this? That’s what I’m saying. Where I’m going is not good. My point is, yes, I think people are fascinated by former President Trump. And so if you’re asking me strictly on that basis, what it portends for the

next four years of the media business…

It’s a boon.

It might be. I pray that we take that equation out of how anybody is supposed to think about this stuff, though.

Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. Have I gotten fired for doing this?

Tags: Aidan McLaughlin, Andrew Ross Sorkin, CNBC, New York Times, Press Club