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, right 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. The source is not a transcript. It is a public CNBC.com article by reporters Matt Rosoff and Lora Kolodny, with short verbatim Musk quotes embedded in their prose. The full interview sits behind CNBC’s PRO paywall and is not available, so only those printed verbatim quotes are quoted below.
• Quotes: from that public CNBC article, not the paywalled PRO transcript or CNBC’s video. The Washington Times prints the “normal human being as president” line the same way, with the word order “could have just”, not “could just have”. NBC News and RealClearPolitics carry a slightly different video-caption version of the “so be it” line (“I’ll say what I want to say…”).
• Attribution caveat (load-bearing): the source is reporter prose, so only text inside quotation marks is verbatim Musk. The reporters’ own narration is not block-quoted here — 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 their words, kept only as prose context. The video captions matter too, because CNBC’s captions condense Musk and change him: the caption reads “I’ll say what I want to say, and if we lose money, so be it” (the variant NBC News and RealClearPolitics carry), but his actual body words are “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”, which is what is block-quoted. The caption “The laptop class is living in la-la land” is editorial as well; “la-la land” never gets block-quoted as his.

Summary

Taped the month after the Tucker Carlson and Bill Maher sit-downs, this is mostly a business-and-macro conversation: Twitter’s cash position, Tesla’s demand and pricing, the Fed as a “brake pedal,” the US–China “conjoined twins” risk, what Community Notes costs in ad revenue. Most of that is not really about his mind, so it stays as context. Three things are. He states his stance on speech and its consequences as a cost he will eat. He retells the OpenAI origin and the Larry Page break as a dated May-2023 episode. And he places himself politically with unusual plainness.

On free speech, this is the plainest money-on-the-line version among these sources, seven months ahead of the DealBook “go fuck yourself” one. He treats an inflammatory tweet not as a misjudgment to walk back but as a price he accepts. On AI, he runs the founding-and-betrayal story again: OpenAI exists, he says, because he wanted a non-commercial counterweight to Google, and his friendship with Larry Page ended over whether to be on humanity’s side. That is the same “speciesist”-for-being-pro-human anecdote the #400 and DealBook sources carry six months later, caught here in May 2023. On politics, he says he voted for Biden and believes Biden won 2020 and it was not stolen (while claiming some fraud), then sums up his wish for the office in a single line.

Several of these views touch contested ground: the 2020-fraud remark, the Soros and shooting tweets his free-speech line is defending, his read on OpenAI, his political self-view.

Key quotes

On speech and its consequences

Defending the tweets that critics said lent credence to conspiracies about George Soros and the Allen, Texas shooting, he names the cost of speaking freely and accepts it:

“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

On why he and Google co-founder Larry Page are no longer friends, he boils the AI-safety quarrel down to one question: whose side are you on, humanity’s or the machines’?

“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 relay 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. That is the reporters’ narration, not his quoted words, so it stays here as context and is not block-quoted as Musk.)

On political self-view

Asked about his 2020 vote, he says he voted for Biden and believes Biden won and the election was not stolen, while still claiming some fraud. Then 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 — the May-2023 “if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it” line, the plainest money-on-the-line statement on speech and consequences among these sources, falling between the civic version he gave on Bill Maher’s show in April 2023 and the combative “go fuck yourself” at DealBook that November.
• AI existential risk — the dated May-2023 telling of the Larry-Page “speciesist” / pro-human-consciousness break, cross-dated against the #400 and DealBook versions rather than duplicated.
• Sam Altman — his May-2023 account of why OpenAI was founded, as a non-commercial counterweight to Google, and his disappointment that it left its non-profit roots behind.
• Elon Musk — a “CNBC / David Faber (2023): speech as a cost, and a political wish” section gathers the political self-placement (“a normal human being as president,” the Biden vote, the belief that 2020 was not stolen but had some fraud) and points to the speech and OpenAI lines block-quoted on the concept pages.