CNBC / David Faber (2023)

• Host/venue: Elon Musk with CNBC anchor David Faber — a roughly hourlong sit-down taped May 16, 2023, in Austin, Texas, immediately after Tesla’s 2023 annual shareholder meeting.
• Format: Televised one-on-one interview (aired on CNBC; clips on Squawk on the Street).
• Date: May 16, 2023.
• Trust tier: public-summary (verified: false, collection_method: public-cnbc-summary-not-full-transcript). The raw body is not a transcript — it is a public CNBC.com article/summary written by reporters (Matt Rosoff, Lora Kolodny) that embeds short verbatim Musk quotes. The full interview sits behind CNBC’s PRO paywall and is not available; this page is built only from the verbatim Musk quotes the public article prints.
• Quote citation: every block quote below is byte-accurate to the raw and anchored — with a #:~:text= fragment whose decoded snippet is a verbatim substring of the quote — to the public CNBC article at the raw’s source_url (the public summary, not the paywalled PRO transcript, not a CNBC video page). The exact “normal human being as president” wording (word order “could have just”, not “could just have”) was cross-checked at The Washington Times, which prints it the same way; the “so be it” body wording comes from the CNBC article the raw is built from (note: NBC News / RealClearPolitics carry the CNBC video-caption variant “I’ll say what I want to say…”, which is not the body wording used here). CNBC is the anchor for all three quotes as the source the raw text IS. Fragments are apostrophe-free, with the in-snippet comma and the “pro-human” hyphen percent-encoded (%2C, %2D).
• Attribution caveat (load-bearing): the raw is reporter prose. Only text inside quotation marks in the article is verbatim Musk; the reporters’ narration is not Musk and is not block-quoted here — e.g. the “takes only two or three days off per year, works seven days a week and gets six hours of sleep a night” line and the “morally wrong … laptop class” framing are the reporters’ words and are used only as prose context. Separately, CNBC’s video captions (“I’ll say what I want to say, and if we lose money, so be it”; “The laptop class is living in la-la land”) are editorial condensations that differ from Musk’s actual words — the body quote is “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”, which is what is quoted here; “la-la land” appears only as a caption and is not block-quoted.

Summary

This May 2023 CNBC interview, taped the month after the Tucker Carlson and Bill Maher sit-downs, is largely a business-and-macro conversation — Twitter’s cash position, Tesla’s demand-and-pricing outlook, the Fed as a “brake pedal,” the US–China “conjoined twins” risk, Community Notes’ ad cost. Most of that is not about his mind and is left as prose context. What is mind-relevant is a small, sharp cluster: the speech-consequences stance stated as a cost he will eat (“if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it”), the OpenAI-origin / Larry Page break told as a dated May-2023 instance, and an unusually plain bit of political self-placement.

The signal: on free speech, this is the wiki’s cleanest money-on-the-line statement seven months before the DealBook “go fuck yourself” version — he frames inflammatory tweeting not as a misjudgment to walk back but as a price he accepts. On AI / OpenAI, he retells the founding-and-betrayal arc — OpenAI exists, on his telling, because he wanted a non-commercial counterweight to Google in AI, and the friendship with Larry Page ended over whether to be on humanity’s side — the same “speciesist”-for-being-pro-human anecdote the #400 and DealBook sources carry six months later, here in its May-2023 form. On politics, he says he believes Biden won 2020 and it was not stolen (while claiming some fraud), says he voted for Biden, and sums up his wish for the office in one line.

Tone note: the wiki records these stated views and attributes them to Musk; it does not endorse or rebut them. Several touch contested matters (the 2020-election-fraud remark, the Soros/shooting-tweet defense the free-speech line responds to, the OpenAI characterization, the political self-view) and are reported as his framing, neutral-documentary.

Key quotes (verbatim, CNBC-article-anchored — Elon Musk only)

On speech and its consequences

His defense of the tweets criticized as lending credence to conspiracies about George Soros and the Allen, Texas shooting — the cost of speaking freely named and accepted:

“I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.” ↗

On OpenAI’s origin and the break with Larry Page

His account of why he is no longer friends with Google co-founder Larry Page — the AI-safety disagreement reduced, in his telling, to whether one should be on humanity’s side:

“The final straw was Larry calling me a ‘species-ist’ for being pro-human consciousness instead of machine consciousness.” ↗

(In the same passage the reporters note his claim that OpenAI exists only because he wanted a non-commercial alternative to Google’s growing dominance in AI, and his disappointment that it abandoned its non-profit roots — narration, used here as context, not block-quoted as Musk.)

On political self-view

Asked about his 2020 vote (he says he voted for Biden, believes Biden won and it was not stolen, while claiming some fraud), he sums up what he wishes for the office:

“I wish we could have just a normal human being as president.” ↗

Connections (pages touched)

• Free-speech absolutism — extended: the May-2023 “if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it” line as the wiki’s cleanest money-on-the-line speech-consequences statement, sitting between the April-2023 civic form and the November-2023 combative “go fuck yourself” form.
• AI existential risk — extended: the May-2023 dated instance of the Larry-Page “speciesist” / pro-human-consciousness break (cross-dated against the #400 and DealBook versions, not duplicated).
• Sam Altman — extended: the May-2023 statement of OpenAI’s founding rationale (a non-commercial counterweight to Google) and disappointment at its abandoned non-profit roots.
• Elon Musk — extended with a “What CNBC / David Faber (2023) reveals” section carrying the political self-placement (“a normal human being as president,” voted-for-Biden, believes-2020-not-stolen-but-some-fraud) and pointers to the speech and OpenAI lines block-quoted on the concept pages; all prior content preserved.