This is a data harvesting operation wearing a civic costume. This is Halloween.
Hi everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
We've got a lot to get into this one. I was actually — it just happened right when I was coming up on the train this morning. Nvidia has launched the largest stock buyback in history, US history, adding $150 billion to its repurchase program and bringing its total authorization to $235 billion. The move comes just four months after Nvidia's board added another $80 billion to the buyback program. The company says it expects revenue growth of 70% in fiscal 2028. Now, its stock had been down, right? It had been at sort of lows, so presumably the buyback was part of that, but it's probably cheap to buy its stock back. So talk a little bit, because I also want to add in another announcement. The company is releasing a tool that it says will stop AI agents from going rogue. How funny the timing. The technology is supposed to help companies to monitor every action taken by an AI agent. This comes after news that OpenAI's agents again went rogue and meddled with government websites, US government websites, without the company's knowledge. But this is amazing. Like these rogues have been all over the place without the company knowing. Meanwhile, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are moving forward with plans to create their own AI safety standards body, because why not let the arsonists run the fire department without government oversight, with a possible launch by the end of this year, early 2027. Nvidia is going to build guardrails. AI companies are going to police themselves, which we do not trust. And then this buyback — every way you want to go.
Well, let's start with the buybacks. I just don't think people recognize just the scale of this. This is the largest buyback in US history. It's a quarter of a trillion dollars. They're buying back more stock than is the value of the majority of the companies in the S&P 500. Now, I've been on a bunch of public company boards. We constantly have conversations around stock buybacks. And generally speaking, I don't like them. I don't like them for the corporation because basically when you take capital and you buy back stock, what you're saying is we have no new ideas to put the capital to use. And I also like putting capital to use because it creates jobs. It forces the CEO to think about growth. And essentially stock buybacks are a bit of an acknowledgement that you're a mature company and you're not growing as fast as you used to. So you're going to start returning money to the shareholders. And to be clear, this is a very efficient way to return money to shareholders. Now, going to the macro view, if you look at the three parts of our economy — consumers, shareholders/owners, and workers — everything we've done the last 40 years via regulatory capture has taken money and power from the consumer and the worker and given it to the shareholder.
You talk about that a lot, because we've let industries consolidate such that they can raise the rates faster. We have neutered employees' power via destruction of unions or a lack of minimum wage or all sorts of regulations that say, 'Oh, no, you don't have to pay this person.' You know, I had a bit of a controversy about some comments I made about paternity and maternity leave, but the reality is it's a conversation only held in the lunchrooms of Google and JP Morgan because only 20% of Americans even have access to paid parental leave. So I don't like these on a company level. I don't like these on a macro level. I think when you do stock buybacks, the company should be forced to pay a small tax, just as when someone pieces out and takes their equity somewhere else to get a lower tax rate such that they don't have to pay back the great states of California and Washington and the infrastructure they provided to create that wealth. I think that's wrong. I think when people borrow against their stock holdings such that they don't incur a taxable event, I think it should trigger a taxable event.
Yeah, that's Peter Thiel original. But what does it say? What is it saying here? Why are they doing it? Obviously, the stock has been lower than it was on a rocket ship and then it fell off pretty considerably for its growth. It's very strange, but by traditional metrics, arguably the most important company in the world, the premier company and the hottest technology in history feels cheap on a PE level. I mean, it's trading at a lower PE than Walmart or Costco. Why? What is the thinking?
Well, there's real fear and anxiety around the AI trade right now. There's a non-zero probability that these AI agents go rogue and we're forced to step in and either nationalize these companies or tell them to stop or take a pause, which is not good for business. So selling shovels in a gold rush is great. Using your shovel profits to buy your own stock, it basically says that the shovel seller isn't sure how long the rush is going to last or how deep the mine is going to go. People like — you know, I remember Chamath Palihapitiya saying this when they buy back, that's a bad sign. It's an acknowledgement you're a mature company.
Yeah, like, or you know, and of course you've said that a lot of times. But what's — we believe in ourselves, but again, you're right, can't they find something else? And talk about this tool they suddenly say they're releasing, that they suddenly have to keep us safe. I mean, obviously they're fighting an uphill battle against this narrative, and even someone who's been much more measured — Yann LeCun, the doomerism is going too far, of course — but who has been pretty measured about the dangers and the assets kind of thing. But the doomers are winning this particular fight right now. How do you look at what now they're saying, 'We have a thing that'll fix it, don't worry, we'll handle it,' and then the same thing, the companies are saying the same, they're worried about liability here. I feel like this is all about their criminal liability and other versions of fraud and product liability, etc.
So, Nvidia selling guardrails is like an arms dealer selling bulletproof vests.
It's a great business model. You get paid on both sides.
Get a good one out of you, right?
Yeah. Here's a bullet, but wait, we'll sell the operating supplies to repair the bullet.
I mean, it's just — I find it a little bit off-putting. And the OpenAI sites meddling with government sites, or OpenAI meddling with government sites without the company knowing, is basically saying we've gone from 'AI might someday act on its own' to 'AI acted on its own last Tuesday and we found out about it in the news.' And I still don't buy this of like, 'Oh my god, you know, Frank's up to no good. I'm so sorry, but it's not my fault.' So Dr. Frankenstein — Frankenstein, or Frank, we'll call him the monster — was sentient. And Dr. Frankenstein could have logically said — it's a great book, by the way. I recommend Mary Shelley, I think is a genius. Anyways, he could say, 'Okay, I regret this. I'm going to try and stop it.' But he's kind of unfortunately making his own decisions. I don't buy that here.
If these guys start facing civil and criminal liability, I just am confident these geniuses are going to figure it out. And they're going to start building amazing bots that gnaw on the bad bots. They're going to say, 'Do this. Read the Constitution. Read every legal thing. Read philosophy and gnaw on any bot that starts behaving.' These things aren't sentient yet. But when you tell them to be persistent, you're taking the risk that they might interpret persistent as building its own code and violating the law.
Yeah, we don't even know what they're doing. I know they're doing stuff we don't know.
I think you can reverse engineer every one of these rogue agents to a programmer at OpenAI or Anthropic who was instructed to program it this way. So, I really don't like this notion that they've gone rogue. No, this is an army and there's a general who gave them these orders.
One of the things that's interesting is that the Republicans — Mike Johnson just had another moronic interview. You know, he was saying the data centers are Chinese spy ops. I mean, honestly, what a [__] [__] this guy is. And that we don't need tech regulation and on and on and on. He's just carrying water for Trump in this regard and the tech companies. I mean, honestly, like he was like, 'We don't need tech regulation yet.' And I'm like, 'We've never had it.' And only someone who's been in the closet for that long would not understand what had been happening. But one of the — Trump keeps supporting him. And at the state dinner, I don't know if you saw this. I want to get into what happened with China, but state dinner, tech leaders, everyone, and they're always at the White House. They're going to be here tomorrow. I think there's going to — they're going to be doing yet another appearance. The state dinner brought out a slew of tech leaders. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg were all there. And of course, you had Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Tim Cook sitting at the head table with Trump and Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. You know, as New York Times' Shawn McCreary put it, it was just a fun little dinner for the people deciding the future of humanity. Why does Trump keep supporting this? And we'll get into the Chinese visit because it doesn't look like anything happened except we got two pandas and maybe extended a trade truce by a couple of months. But he keeps doubling down on them. Trump does, as does Mike Johnson, as do not all the Republicans. A lot of Republicans are, you know, cutting loose and pulling away.
Why does he keep doubling down on AI?
On AI, yeah. And Johnson, too.
Because the economy is the lone economy and GDP growth is the lone bright spot in the Trump administration right now. The economy is actually — I mean, the deficit is a huge problem. Inflation is a big problem, but the underlying growth of our GDP, the majority of the G7 would kill for it. We're still growing and growth is important. It's the only way out of a deficit. It's the only way — growth and productivity solve not all but most problems. So his attitude is if 72% of corporate earnings are coming from the hyperscalers, if 93% of GDP growth is coming from the just unprecedented capex spending, then do not get in the way of this. This is the only thing I have going right now. This is my fallback is to keep asking people how the 401k is doing. But the thing about self-regulation, which is he has basically said self-regulate, is it has a track record. We have a history here. It does work for low-stakes products. So, for example, the movie ratings, the MPAA, the G or PG-13, video games have it, the ESRB. But where it fails is for high-stakes industries. For example, the Tobacco Research Council. I don't know if you remember that. You shouldn't because it didn't work. Wall Street before 2008, or Facebook's oversight board, or the new one, the CNN editorial board. Self-regulation is a diet where you're the nutritionist and the cake. It just — you need a combination. The answer is both, right? Nuclear power has the NRC. Airlines have the FAA and drugs have the FDA. We don't let Boeing certify its jets anymore. We learned that the hard way.
But he keeps — like these dinners, they have been to the White House more than I — literally, I'm so sick of seeing these same group of people at the same dinners. They have more influence than the cabinet.
Why? I was thinking, I was sitting there going, why don't they invite like the trucking people there? Why don't they invite — maybe they're there, but it's these same people in the same critical seats. And I'm kind of like, hey, let a concrete manufacturer in there sometime, or let like another industry. You don't see — I mean, I know Jamie Dimon was at this dinner, speaking of which. David Ellison was also at this dinner while they were keeping CNN out of it. But it's a really interesting thing. It's like how long this is going to — this kind of weird kabuki drama between them is going to continue. And at the same time they got nothing, which is probably what they wanted. No AI policy at all during the Xi visit, right? And for people who don't know that — you know, what do you think of what happened, the visit? I think most people think nothing. But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was not at the state dinner. This gang doesn't like him because he's a little bit slower. But he and Trump had their own private dinner Sunday night. I haven't found out what they were talking about, but he was there at the dinner — I mean, at his own dinner, because I guess he can't dine with the others. But they're obviously there having enormous influence, and yet nothing happened during the summit with our key partner in AI, which would be China.
It's a mix of courtship and coercion. You blacklist the company on Thursday and then you invite its CEO for dinner on Sunday. It's not policy. It's a protection racket with a wine pairing. It's just — it's so inconsistent.
Well, the metaphors are just so easy. They write themselves right now.
Yeah. Yeah. We're in an arms race with China, then label one of its frontier labs a national security risk. It's benching kind of your starting quarterback during the Super Bowl because he won't go to your barbecue. I mean, it's just these guys — and I have never seen two people such as Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. I've never seen two people more in over their head ever. And I don't want to say empathize with them, but they have so much pressure to recognize the economic potential that they have built. All their employees must be counting their money, buying houses. Thousands of investors who desperately need to show that they know how to invest money. The president putting pressure on them, and at the same time they have employees saying this might be an extinction event, right? A lot of employees actually. And then much evidence that they don't have control of their technology. It's like I'm on the road and my 16-year-old who refuses to go to bed when I'm there — when I'm on the road, he'll call me. He'll FaceTime me in bed because he wants guardrails. He's like, 'I want to know the rules by which I play by.' And these CEOs, I actually think they're pretty genuine at a minimum. I mean, they want to shape the AI or they want to shape the regulation, but they're saying, 'Jesus Christ, just tell me what I'm allowed to do and not allowed to do.' Well, not with this gang, not with this Trump. You know, supposedly he had a scheduling conflict, so Trump invited him to a private dinner, but I think there's a lot of enmity between him and the rest of the gang that was there, especially Jensen Huang and Moltmann for sure. Not that Trump cares.
This is the worst managed so far. Like, I'll give you something. I was at an event with a lot of alternative investment managers. That's the best managed brand in recent corporate history because basically what they've convinced America still to do is to pay them fees for a product that doesn't work. If you take all of the most famous hedge funds and all of the brilliant investors, you know, Berkshire Hathaway, CI, you add all of them up, they have underperformed the S&P by the amount of their fees. And yet we all, including myself, think we're lucky when we get into this fund or whatever it is. They have done an amazing job — the brand of alternative investments has convinced capital globally that they can outperform the market. And you know what pension manager does the best job? It's a guy who runs the Nevada Retirement Authority. He has a shitty office and all he does is invest in a bunch of different Vanguard low-cost funds. He's one guy. And most of these states and countries have hundreds if not thousands of well-paid people figuring out a way to underperform the S&P by their fees over the medium and the long term. What an amazing brand. Equally bad is AI. It's gone from 'AI is going to take our job' to 'AI is going to kill us.' Kill us. What's the next thing? Yeah, it's going to — well, hell exists and you're going there. But did they — what were they doing? The other thing was this dinner. Like this dinner was really interesting because I think Xi won the entire thing. And what was really fascinating is all these Fox News stars were there, like what's his name? The one that's on the show with Jesse — Jesse Watters going on and on about communism and then yucking it up with the communists. It was just like these people, like honestly — this was such a missed opportunity.
Yeah. Nothing happened. When you have Xi and Trump in the same room and you have the AI folks, the opportunity to say to Xi, look, we're competing on AI, but there's a lot of overlap in terms of the things we want to prevent. We don't want a middle power developing a nuclear bomb. We don't want bioweapons. We don't want our kids to be depressed. This is an opportunity for us to establish connective tissue between the number one and the number two economic power and cooperate. And we're going to outline — if they had both done a press conference, this would have been the smartest move for Trump going into the midterms. If they had a joint press conference and they'd had their diplomats, instead of the faulty cult they have now. But if they had their diplomats working for a long time to say these are the areas we're going to agree to cooperate on around AI, it would have made an outstanding closing ceremony that would have reflected well on both of them. This was a huge missed opportunity for the Trump administration.
Yeah, we got a panda. It was a photo op.
Two. We got two pandas. Look, this is again another missed opportunity. This was meaningless and it was a huge opportunity. It should have been around cooperation around AI that would have made our populace feel better and show leadership and bilateral cooperation. Huge missed opportunity.
He was definitely showing off the tech leaders, but they looked ridiculous. Anyway, let's go on a quick break. When we come back, Elon's voting website scam.
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Scott, we're back with a little over a month to go before Election Day. There are some questions and concerns about election security. Some legitimate, some not. Obviously, the New York Times just had a great story showing that all these fraud allegations that Trump had of thousands of voters, it turned out to be zero. But if you're heading to the website votesafe.org for answers, information, think twice. The site is run by Elon Musk's America PAC. VoteSafe can collect your name, address, email, phone number, political information, and browsing activity. Its privacy policy says that information may be shared or sold to business partners. For safe and reliable voting information, go to vote.gov — even if it's run by the president, it's the official government website — or vote.org, which is run by a nonpartisan nonprofit. If you're voting from overseas, there's also votefromabroad.org. Full disclosure, it's run by an organization of Democrats abroad. There's a lot of tricky voting information websites out there that you have to be very careful of, and Elon's at the forefront. Early voting is already underway in several states. So are you worried about this chaos? I run into a lot of people who remain continually worried about Trump, Elon, and others creating chaos around the election. You know, martial law was brought up last week by some of Trump's outside advisors. I don't think he's capable of doing that, but maybe I think he's capable of it. I don't think he'll be able to do it. The Supreme Court has cleared the way for states to use the Trump administration's citizen database to check ineligible voters, but there's not that many. So it's kind of stupid. It's kind of stupid. What they're trying to do is prevent people from voting. And just the last part, Trump is reportedly predicting the Republicans will overperform in November. Pretty much every other sign pointing the opposite direction. His disapproval rating just hit 60.4%, the worst of either of his two terms, even worse after January 6th, if you can believe it. Meanwhile, gas is averaging nearly $4.50 a gallon. Mortgage rates have hit above 7%, and we're seven months into the war with Iran with no apparent exit strategy. A lot of Republicans are now calling for that. One Republican adviser gave Axios this assessment of the GOP's midterm outlook: 'The numbers are somewhere between shitabulous and craptastic.' You know, he's moving into the 20s in approval ratings, by the way. And I think the best joke I heard was he's very excited to get to the teens because he loves them. What do you think, Scott, about all this? This voting thing just drives me crazy. I want people to go and make sure they can vote, but not be tricked by these ridiculous websites that are PAC websites essentially.
Well, let's talk about — okay, there's a lot there. Let's start with Musk.
I just don't think — I think history shows that power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts, and we never look back on history and think this one powerful person should have more power. We just never, almost never think that. And just to be fair, I heard Elon Musk speak recently.
The guy is an enormously big thinker. It is very difficult not to be inspired when you hear that the new Falcon Heavy rocket is going to have a payload capacity to put a space station in orbit on every launch, and he wants to get to a launch every five minutes. I mean, it just — and he's building a vehicle that has the greatest thrust in history. It just — you can't help but be inspired by the guy. I want to acknowledge that taxes protect us from this type of absolute power and corruption. And I'm not saying — I think people should be allowed to make billions and trillions of dollars. I think you want to let your thoroughbreds run. And this guy, from an innovation standpoint, is Secretariat. The concentration of power, we need to have checks on it. And actually, taxation, progressive taxation, is a check on that power. As it relates to votes.org, this is a data harvesting operation wearing a civic costume. This is Halloween. It collects your name, address, political info, and browsing activity, and then it can sell them. It's basically a fake ATM that skims your card and then tells you where to vote.
And then it could tell you bad things, and who knows what its information is.
He's done this before. The $1 million a day petition was also a data grab in swing states. He's not doing voter outreach. He's doing voter acquisition. And in politics, the list is the asset. Phone numbers, emails of motivated voters are worth more than the ad. This again is list building disguised as public service to me. And I don't think it's illegal. I think it should be illegal.
And I would — so anyways.
Well, I'm glad he's inspiring, but I think he's also extraordinarily dangerous in this area — in this area of wanting to create chaos. Why lie about who you are? Just say, 'Hey, I'm Elon.' If he's so open and honest and inspiring, just say, 'I'm Elon Musk. I'm for Trump right here, and we'll talk about it. You can give me your information.' Hiding himself in plain sight seems to be a very disingenuous thing to do.
This is a broader theme and solution we need to move to, and that is we need to move further towards one person, one vote, as outlined initially by our founding fathers. We have strayed so far from that. It's a small number of voters and a small number of states and a small number of people and organizations that decide our elections. We need to gerrymander the US. In certain states in the South, they have 20, 30% Black voters, but they've figured out a way to not give them any representation. It doesn't matter what you vote in California or New York. It doesn't matter with respect to national politics. We need huge reform around Citizens United. We need to gerrymander — just take a grid and place it over the US and make congressional districts. And also we just should not be comfortable with any organization, including the healthcare industry, which is now the biggest political donor, or an individual having this kind of power. It's just not — it's anathema to the basic notions of a democracy.
It is. I mean, I understand. I have been in that inspiring talk by you, and I think he doesn't do as much as he says he's going to do, but he talks a great game, and he does a lot too. He's done a lot. But the question is, does it outweigh this kind of nefarious activity and also his string of, you know, racist and misogynist and anti-trans and sort of going into other — When I was abroad, everyone there was talking about the way he meddles in other people's politics by supporting right-wingers.
Well, the new American export is political division. He [__] post-Brexit Britain. He hasn't been there in three years.
He's exporting American political division. I feel the same way about Musk as I feel about big tech, and that is if you had a button to say, all right, he ends up going into art and we never hear his name, or you had a button where big tech could just go away, I don't think you'd want to push that button. I think these guys, and big tech — I would argue, as critical as I am of Musk, are a net positive. The problem is with the word 'net' in that is you can appreciate that he inspired the EV race. You can appreciate space exploration. You can appreciate the economic growth and the wealth he's created for people. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't hold him accountable for saying there's a white genocide in South Africa, for having a media platform that really does seem to rip the fabric of the American experience and how we feel about each other, to use his wealth to probably swing elections and swing —
States. It's like Henry Ford. He was always racist and misogynist and anti-Semitic. [snorts] But a similar situation — he would put out newspapers at the dealerships. He would try to swing elections. This is the kind of thing that has been in our history and we have to put a stop to it. And this votesafe.org is disingenuous. That is it.
No, it really should be. That data harvesting posing as something else should be illegal. It is fraud.
These predictions by Trump that he's doing great.
Well, what is he going to say? I predict we're going to get slaughtered in the midterms.
I got to be honest, Kara, I'm really nervous about this. If I had a magic wand right now, I'd want the election held this afternoon.
I think the Democrats are just unbelievably good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It's like if there's a way to [__] this up, I think right now we would take the House and the Senate, which I would love to see.
I'm just like, 'Oh, Jesus Christ, don't [__] this up.'
Yeah. Oddly enough, I've run into a lot of Trump supporters who are no longer that way everywhere I go, which is really interesting. And they want to talk to me about it. I'm like, I listen to all of them. I'm like, 'Oh, good, good. Get out and vote. I'm going to vote against him.' I'm like, 'Well, we'll see. Let's see if you do it.' And I agree with you. It's nerve-wracking, but it's not that long. Okay, let's go on a quick break and when we come back, who's running ads for the new Elon Musk documentary and who's not?
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Scott, we're back with more news actually related to Elon. Meta and YouTube are reversing course and will now run ads for Alex Gibney's upcoming Elon Musk documentary after initially rejecting them. Meta, YouTube, and TikTok reportedly refused to run the ads for political content reasons. That explanation didn't make much sense since we're talking about a movie trailer, not a campaign ad. It's not that hard. Meta now says the rejection was an error, while YouTube says the system temporarily restricted an ad before clearing it following a review. TikTok still isn't running the ads, and no surprise, neither is X. He doesn't have to. I don't really care. How would you promote the film? Just very briefly on this one. It seemed kind of stupid by these tech companies to look like they're carrying.
How would I promote the film? First off, I'd edit it down to two hours. I just think a four-hour film is destined to not be seen by a lot of people.
Also, I hate to say it, but 'banned by big tech' is a great trailer, and money can't buy that. It's the Streisand effect as a marketing plan.
Yeah, that worked this weekend.
Where would you promote it? I would put billboards across the street from Tesla dealerships because I think it got a lot of attention. I would do projections on the side of X's offices [laughter] and get shut down. Bluesky, Threads, Reddit, podcasts where the audience is already Elon-skeptical, highly engaged people. And then theater pre-rolls. I love marketing. One thing I used to do, you know, what was in brand strategy was talk about media plans. The platforms' reversal on this is a tell. When they first said they wouldn't run it, now they are. Meta called it an error. The error was thinking that no one would notice. And when your first instinct is to block criticism of a billionaire, the algorithm isn't neutral, it's differential. And that's the problem — these billionaires have a different set of standards or get to live by a different set of standards. And one of the nice things about America is that we have a series of checks and balances that check, and quite frankly are sometimes unfair to popular people, and that's healthy.
So exactly. You know, X not running it — of course not. You don't expect the Kremlin state newspaper to run ads for Navalny. I get it. Right. Yeah. But the other guys — if they're going to be [__] for bot farms, probably sponsored by the IRGC and the GRU and the CCP, banning an ad for the Musk film doc just comes across as very much a different set of standards for rich people.
It'll be interesting to see what the Ellisons do because it's supposed to go on HBO and they will be in control of HBO.
Oh, that's really interesting.
Yeah, that should be interesting. We'll see. Because they are close, actually. Larry Ellison and Musk are very close.
Well, Musk considers Ellison his mentor.
Yes, he does. Yes, he does. Yeah. And he's gotten him out of a lot of jams. A lot of jams. Anyway, lastly, this was, I thought, hysterical. I don't know if you saw SNL. I didn't think it was a very strong show, although Jalen Brunson is so adorable. Saturday Night Live took the AI industry's recent doom-mongering, with Jane Wicklane playing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei this weekend. This clip, I thought this was spot on. Let's see the clip.
You know, thanks for having me, Michael. I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.
Dario, can you just explain how your company isn't going to kill us?
So, so, so, so, so, so, so that's a really hard question.
