DealBook Summit 2023

• Interviewer / venue: Andrew Ross Sorkin, on stage at The New York Times DealBook Summit in New York.
• Format: a roughly 1h33m live on-stage interview, the day before the first Cybertruck deliveries. Recorded and posted November 29–30, 2023, in the immediate aftermath of an advertiser exodus from X. The Times titled the clip “Elon Musk on Advertisers, Trust and the ‘Wild Storm’ in His Mind.”
• Trust tier: higher-trust full transcript. The source holds two transcripts of the same talk. Quotes here are cited to the first: the Rev.com transcript, human-edited paragraphs that label each speaker (Andrew Ross Sorkin: / Elon Musk:) and carry (mm:ss) timestamps. The second is a lower-trust yt-dlp YouTube caption track, kept only to cross-check the timeline.
• Quotes: from the Rev transcript, and only Musk’s lines; none of Sorkin’s questions or framings are quoted. A handful of > blocks carry no ↗; those are editorial notes, not quotes.

Summary

Of all the interviews collected here, this is the one that opens Musk up the most. Sorkin, who has known him for sixteen years, spends ninety combative minutes pushing on the two questions that matter most for understanding him: how he thinks, and what his state of mind actually is. Musk, fresh off the “actual truth” post and an advertiser boycott, answers with unusual rawness. This talk is the primary spoken source for three threads the later 2023 Lex Fridman conversation only echoes.

The first is the “wild storm” itself. Sorkin reads back a line Musk once used on a podcast, my mind is a storm, and asks him to go deeper. He does. The storm is real and it is not a happy one. He was born this way and then amplified by a difficult childhood; even the happy moments of childhood carried a rage of forces in my mind constantly; the “demons of the mind” are, on balance, harnessed to productive ends. It is the fullest first-person account of the storm and its roots in childhood anywhere here. And the timing matters: in the same month as the biography, Musk is confirming in his own voice the causal story Isaacson tells from the outside.

The second is where the philosophy of curiosity comes from. Asked what he is trying to prove, Musk waves off the psychoanalytic angle and instead tells the story of an existential crisis at around 12: the religious texts, the depressing German philosophy books, then Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He arrives at the same creed he has restated since 2021 — expand consciousness so you can ask better questions. Of the sources gathered here, this is the earliest where he narrates where that creed came from.

The third is the combative free-speech, trust, and advertiser material the interview is famous for: the “go fuck yourself” to advertisers he reads as blackmail, the “only relevant when someone you don’t like can say something you don’t like” First-Amendment reasoning, and the pro-censorship-left claim. Packed in around it is a dense run of AI material. There is the magic genie image for why he held off building AI, and the line that AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs. There is the whole OpenAI grievance: Larry Page, speciest, super closed source for maximum profit AI. And there is AI fatalism as a way to sleep, the digital god, and less than three years to superhuman AI. Then the physics-is-the-law credo, and a closing note on a neural interface.

Several of his claims here sit on contested political and personal ground: his account of the “actual truth” post and the antisemitism furor around it, his blame for the advertiser boycott, the China and business questions, the grievance over Biden and the EV summit. Where Sorkin pushes back on what he is claiming, that is noted. The profanity stays as he said it where it carries his point.

Key quotes

The “wild storm” in his mind

Sorkin reads back Musk’s own earlier line, my mind is a storm, and asks whether the storm is a happy one. Musk answers “No” twice, then gives the fullest spoken description anywhere here of what the storm actually is:

“Yes. Yeah. It as much as a weather metaphor makes sense. My mind often feels like a very wild storm.” ↗

The storm is a surplus of ideas. The constraint is not imagination but the capacity to act on it:

“I have a fountain of ideas. I have more ideas than I could possibly execute, so I have no shortage of ideas. Innovation is not the problem. Execution is the problem.” ↗

Asked where the storm comes from, he gives the causal account, born this way and then amplified by a hard childhood, that matches Isaacson’s thesis almost exactly, only in the first person:

“I think to some degree, I was born this way and then I was amplified by a difficult childhood, frankly.” ↗

Even the happy moments carried it. The storm is a constant, not an episode that comes and goes:

“But I can remember even in happy moments when I was a kid, that it just feels like there’s just a rage of forces in my mind constantly.” ↗

And the resolution he draws, the same hardness-as-engine reading the biographers report: the demons are mostly pointed at building things.

“So these demons of the mind are, for the most part, harnessed to productive ends.” ↗

Not needing to be liked; the reality of goodness

His stated indifference to being liked, which he presents as a strength rather than a defense:

“I think it’s a real weakness to want to be liked, a real weakness. I do not have that.” ↗

“And I have no problem being hated by the way.” ↗

The value claim underneath it: effects over appearances, the same distrust of stated virtue that runs through Woke mind virus.

“I’m saying what I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it.” ↗

The philosophy of curiosity, and its childhood origin

Pressed on what is “driving all of this”, whether he is trying to prove something, Musk rejects the premise and names his worldview instead:

“No. If I were to describe my philosophy, it is a philosophy of curiosity.” ↗

He traces it to a childhood existential crisis, the earliest narrated origin of the creed we have:

“I did have this existential crisis when I was around 12, about what’s the meaning of life? Isn’t it all pointless? Why not just commit suicide? Why exist?” ↗

The books that deepened the gloom, and the one that broke it:

“I read the religious texts. I read the philosophy books. That, especially the German philosophy books, made me quite depressed frankly.” ↗

“But then I read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a book on philosophy in the form of humor.” ↗

The Adams lesson, applied to physics. This is his recurring move: getting the question right is the hard part.

“And I think this is generally true also in physics. At the point at which you can properly frame the question, the answer is actually the easy part.” ↗

The expand-consciousness conclusion, the same one the 2021 and 2023 Lex Fridman versions restate:

“But if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.” ↗

And the reason-to-live he attaches to the Mars mission, inspiration, with the “ask your kids” tell:

“There have to be reasons that you have to say, why are you excited about the future? What gives you hope? And if you aren’t sure, ask your kids.” ↗

Physics is the law

The first-principles credo, stated here two weeks after the #400 version, prompted by Sorkin asking whether being told he is wrong is now a red flag for him:

“Physics is unforgiving. Physics is unforgiving. I have these various little sayings that I’ve come up with, that physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation.” ↗

The consequence he draws: reality checks whether you are wrong, not opinion.

“In the sense that you can break any law made by humans, but try breaking a law made by physics.” ↗

Advertisers, trust, and free speech

The interview’s most-quoted moment, his response to advertisers leaving X, which he reads as coercion:

“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.” ↗

What he says he is aiming X at, and his old joke about the platform he bought:

“The aspiration for X is to be the global town square.” ↗

“I mean, look, the joke I used to make about old Twitter was it was like giving everyone in the psych ward a megaphone.” ↗

The free-speech principle in its relevance-test form, the same reasoning his 2024 All-In and 2025 CNBC statements restate:

“It’s only relevant when someone you don’t like can say something you don’t like or it has no meaning.” ↗

The consequence he draws: any concession to censorship eventually reaches you.

“And as soon as you throw in the towel and concede to censorship, it is only a matter of time before someone censors you.” ↗

His pro-censorship-left claim, with the historical reversal he sees in it:

“on balance, the Democrats appear to be more pro-censorship than the Republicans, and that used to be the opposite.” ↗

And the constructive aim he sets against censorship: truth through better information, the truth-tracking instinct.

“my aspiration for the X platform is that it is the best source of truth, or the least inaccurate source of truth.” ↗

“I think honesty is the best policy, and I think that the truth will win over time.” ↗

AI — the magic genie, the regulation case, and OpenAI

Why he held off building AI for years: the double-edged-sword, magic-genie image that organizes his whole AI-risk stance.

“You may think you want a magic genie, but once that genie’s out of the bottle, it’s hard to say what happens.” ↗

His sharpest regulation analogy, AI as a danger on the order of nuclear weapons:

“So I think, in my view, AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs and we regulate nuclear bombs.” ↗

How he says he learned to live with the fear: fatalism as a sleep aid, the same coping move the 2024 All-In “suspension of disbelief” line restates.

“For awhile there, I was really getting demotivated and losing sleep over the threat of AI danger, and then I finally became fatalistic about it” ↗

His standing claim to have warned longest, the Cassandra role in its 2023 form:

“I’ve been the one banging the drum the hardest, by far the longest, or at least one of longest for AI danger” ↗

The full OpenAI grievance, the same arc the #400 “not good karma” line tracks, here told at length. Why it was started:

“the reason for starting OpenAI was to create a counterweight to Google and DeepMind” ↗

The Larry Page break, the speciest-for-being-pro-humanity story (the same anecdote #400 carries, here in the DealBook wording):

“And it became apparent to me that Larry did not care about AI safety.” ↗

“I think perhaps the thing that gave it away was when he called me a speciest for being pro-humanity, as in a racist, but for species.” ↗

His verdict on what OpenAI became, the “super closed source” inversion of its founding name:

“It is in fact a closed source, super closed. It should be renamed super closed source for maximum profit AI.” ↗

His read on Sam Altman during the November 2023 board crisis, the “ring of power” image:

“The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power.” ↗

A note on the training data behind these models, in the same AI exchange:

“These AIs are all trained on copyrighted data, obviously.” ↗

ℹ️ Two more strands from this same AI exchange live on AI existential risk instead of here, to avoid repeating them. One is his materialist deflation of “AGI”, the model as just a “common separated value file” and the “digital god” he finds funny, quoted in full there. The other is his “less than three years” call to superhuman AI, kept there in prose.

TikTok “probing my mind”

A striking aside on why he stopped using TikTok, the algorithm experienced as an adversarial intelligence (also block-quoted on Woke mind virus):

“I stopped using TikTok when I felt the AI probing my mind and it made me uncomfortable, so I stopped using it.” ↗

Confidence, optimism, and “I always deliver in the end”

On why he trusts his own judgment after being told he was wrong so often, physics as the unforgiving check (paired with the credo above):

“So if you are wrong and persist in being wrong, the rockets will blow up and the cars will fail.” ↗

His self-diagnosis of “pathological optimism”, and the candid odds he gives his own companies at the start:

“I certainly wouldn’t have sold a rocket company or electric car company if I didn’t have some sort of pathological optimism, frankly.” ↗

“But I thought SpaceX and Tesla had less than a 10% chance of success when we started them.” ↗

Lords and peasants, and the neural interface

His stated reason for opposing unions, not economics but a horror of hierarchy (also block-quoted on Elon Musk):

“I just don’t like anything which creates kind of a lords and peasants sort of thing.” ↗

The closing Neuralink note: when Sorkin jokes about Musk making a phone, Musk reaches for the brain interface instead.

“The best interface would be a neural interface directly to your brain. So that would be a neural link.” ↗

“Amplify empathy” — taken literally

Sorkin closes on Musk’s two-word post amplify empathy. The answer is a clean sample of his literal-mindedness:

“Well, I was encouraging people to amplify empathy, literally. I tend to be quite literal.” ↗

It sits next to the reasoned-empathy thread on Emotional suppression and the later “suicidal empathy” line. Here, though, empathy is simply something to amplify, stated plainly and without the civilizational caveat he attaches to it later.

Connections (pages touched)

• Emotional suppression — extended with the fullest first-person account anywhere here of the “wild storm”: born this way and then amplified by a difficult childhood, a rage of forces in my mind constantly, the storm as not happy, and demons of the mind … harnessed to productive ends. This is the spoken source behind the #400 “my mind is a storm” line.
• Childhood adversity — extended with Musk’s own corroboration, in the same month as the biography, of Isaacson’s born-this-way-plus-difficult-childhood causal story.
• Curiosity and truth-seeking — extended with the earliest narrated origin of the “philosophy of curiosity”: the existential crisis at ~12, the religious/German-philosophy reading, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and the expand-consciousness-to-ask-better-questions conclusion.
• AI existential risk — extended with the magic genie image, AI is more dangerous than nuclear bombs, the fatalism-to-sleep coping move, the banging the drum … longest Cassandra claim, the full OpenAI-arc grievance (counterweight → speciest → super closed source), the “ring of power” read on Altman, and the “less than three years” timing call (in prose).
• Free-speech absolutism — extended with the 2023 advertiser-boycott / “global town square” form: the “blackmail … go fuck yourself” stance, concede to censorship … someone censors you, and the truth-via-information aim.
• Woke mind virus — extended with the Democrats … more pro-censorship claim, the “reality of goodness vs the perception of it” distrust-of-stated-virtue line, and the TikTok “probing my mind” aside.
• First principles — extended with the 2023 spoken physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation / try breaking a law made by physics statement, and the rockets will blow up consequence.
• Sam Altman — extended: the November-2023 board-crisis “ring of power” read, and the at-length telling of the OpenAI founding-and-betrayal arc.
• Elon Musk — extended with a “DealBook Summit 2023: the storm, unpacked” section threading the wild-storm psychology, the curiosity-philosophy origin, the combative free-speech/advertiser stance, the dense AI/OpenAI material, the physics credo, the “pathological optimism,” and the “lords and peasants” anti-union reasoning.