Hello, Acquired listeners. We are coming to you today with a very fun ACQ2 interview with our buddy Andrew Ross Sorkin. Yep, we got to know Andrew over the summer for our Radio City show where we had a delightful cameo with him, and he's got a new book, 1929, and he's doing a book tour. And we said, hey, do you want to come on ACQ2 given you're doing the book tour? And rather than just talking about the book, why don't we talk about how the heck do you do all of this that you do? Like, we're dying just making one show, you know, you do like four things every day. So, there's the New York Times DealBook, the daily newsletter. There's the DealBook Summit, which happens every December. There's, of course, that he co-created the show Billions. He is every single morning from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern on CNBC doing Squawk Box. He's written Too Big to Fail and 1929, two major books.
Yeah, this was a very fun conversation.
So today's conversation is a little bit how does he do it all? But also we realize Andrew's never actually told this story before of how it all came to be. How did he start a business daily email newsletter in 2001? I mean, this is over a decade before Substack, I don't know, 15 years before the era of Substack, doing it inside now the biggest newspaper in the US, I think in the world, and now every December doing DealBook Summit, which to me is kind of the flagship canonical business interview forum in the world. I mean, that's more than that, business, technology, politics. So listeners, this conversation was especially interesting to David and I for navel-gazing reasons, but we think Andrew's story is just fascinating. It really illustrates the shift in the media landscape, and I am just so interested in how he maintains the quality bar that he does across such a wide, wide set of activities. So please enjoy our conversation on the insane productivity of Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Andrew, you're wearing something different than you were wearing on Squawk Box this morning. How does that work?
Yeah. What's your wardrobe change throughout the day look like?
So I did that for you, to be honest with you.
Yes. Usually I'm in a suit basically all day. I kind of sleep in a suit with a tie. [laughter] And then I thought to myself, we're doing this podcast. There might be video. These guys are probably going to wear like sweaters or look cool and I'm going to look like some like old man in a suit. I'll put a sweater on. So that's what's going on here. [laughter]
Okay. So Andrew, I've always thought of you as a New York Times reporter. I've thought of you as the founder of DealBook. You also do Squawk Box. How do you think about that? Especially since that's over by what, 9:00 a.m.?
It is over by 9:00 a.m., but it's a full three hours, which oftentimes feels like a lot longer than that. Not in the moment. I think we have a ball in the moment. But for me, it's the way I begin my day and all the things that I try to do. You know, in many ways I'm doing DealBook, oftentimes finishing it up even before Squawk Box starts, and then doing Squawk Box and then going back to DealBook and going to other projects, and they all sort of inform each other in interesting ways. About 15 years ago, I want to say in 2011, I used to be a guest on Squawk Box often, and they called me up and they said, 'Hey, would you want to be the host of the show?' And I thought, 'That's crazy. I can't read a teleprompter. I've never done this before. This is insane.'
Was one of the other hosts retiring or like how did this...
A couple of things had happened, actually. I don't know if you remember a legendary journalist named Mark Haines, who was the original host of Squawk Box and then was on a show called Squawk on the Street, passed away, and they were going to reshape Squawk on the Street. And Carl Quintanilla, who was one of the three hosts of Squawk Box, was going to move to that show, and so they were looking for somebody to put in his chair. And I thought, you know, I love my job at The Times. I'd been there since I was 18 years old, and they were willing to have me do the show in the morning and also allow me to continue doing a lot of the other work that I enjoy doing. I could have the best of both worlds. This would be great. And as long as I could be awake at that hour. Now, I was always up early. So the up early was not the hard part, though. I don't think I was up early with makeup on and lights. I was always up early because I was publishing DealBook, our newsletter, which typically was going out between 7 and 8 o'clock in the morning. So I always did have to get up early, but I was often in my pajamas. I wasn't, you know, interviewing people.
And if you need that time to publish DealBook, now you don't have that time.
Yes and no. So, a couple of things. The DealBook team has grown, so that actually was a huge benefit. And also I end up spending usually about an hour in the morning before Squawk Box starts sort of making last tweaks and things to the DealBook newsletter. And that's actually one of the great ways that I sort of read in, as they say in the TV business, to learn about everything that's going on sort of as I'm doing my last licks at the newsletter to make sure everything's in order.
What time are you getting up? What time is your day starting?
Right. This is 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. now that you're doing the last-minute tweaks. 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Eastern.
So my day usually begins around 4:30 in the morning. That's usually when I wake up-ish. I'd say I lie in bed with my phone under the covers, like looking at email, texts that came in overnight, Slacks oftentimes around DealBook and things like that. And then I'm oftentimes writing. If you read DealBook, at the top it says, 'Good morning, Andrew here.' I'm writing that in the morning every morning. That's because I need to see where we are in terms of like what we're going to really, you know, lean into for the top of the newsletter. Oftentimes trying to change the subject line or other things like that as we try to get more readers.
Yeah. It's very clear whenever I open it up that that is a lead. That is a hook. This is a pitch to me of the rest of this newsletter is interesting. Here's why. Read on.
That's the goal. So if that's working for you, knock on wood. [laughter] That's great.
So are you sending that from the news desk at CNBC?
No. So the button is being pressed actually in Europe by two of my colleagues, Michael Diederich, who's actually been with me at DealBook for about 20 years now, and Bernard Warner, who works overnight, he lives in Italy actually, and they're working with a copy editor doing some of the last-minute changes, and then usually we're doing a little bit of slacking back and forth in the morning before things go out.
They're later in the day. They've had their coffee when they're hitting the...
They've had their coffee. They've been fixing, adding, sometimes completely rewriting and changing the mess that we've made, you know, out of New York overnight.
How do you think about the content of the newsletter? Are those stories created in service of creating a cohesive newsletter or are you trying to create a newsletter out of the most interesting business stories of yesterday?
Combination of both. So I think for the purpose of the newsletter, we're thinking about how can we make the reader armed and dangerous before their 9:00 meeting or their breakfast in the morning or wherever they're headed off to. DealBook actually transformed itself over the last... and we're coming up on 25 years of doing this. You know, in the beginning it was really for the world of dealmakers. It was M&A bankers and lawyers and accountants and people in that ecosystem. And then increasingly CEOs started to read it and board members and strategic dev groups, and then regulators and politicians started to read it. So I think we sort of shifted our focus, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, to really sort of try to capture the intersection of business and policy and really connect the dots between lots of different storylines. And so every morning I think we're trying to find, you know, as many scoopy original stories, but also be able to try to take a story that's in the news and spin it forward if we can.
Hm. We're sort of starting in media res here. Let's go back to the beginning. Let's go back to the start of DealBook, the newsletter before there was a summit. I don't think people realize how early you were to the email game or to The Times. I mean, you made the quip earlier in our conversation about you started at, you know, when you were 18 at the time. You literally started at age 18, right, at the New York Times. That's not a joke.
All right, let's go there. How'd that happen?
Okay, so backstory is I'm 15 years old. I got to go back three years. All I wanted to do is be in media. Not necessarily as a journalist. Actually, the business side of media was more interesting to me. And I was selling ads for the school newspaper and then ultimately created my own magazine in my high school in Scarsdale, New York, called the Sports Page magazine. And the purpose of the magazine was as much about sports journalism as much as it was about selling ads and trying to capture a particular audience. In this case, high school-aged boys, which were harder to get to than high school-aged girls at the time. The magazines would be distributed across the country, inside high schools. Advertisers would pay, kids would write the articles about professional sports as if they were writing Sports Illustrated. So, we did it, and about a year into this project, the New York Times wrote a little article about this little endeavor. My mother used to drive me down to New York City to different advertising agencies because I'd have to go sell my ads, and they were cheap. I mean, cheap on a relative basis, like 900 bucks, 1,200 bucks for a full-page ad, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah. But for you as a high school student, this is amazing.
Huge. Anyway, it succeeded and failed by the time I was about 18 years old. [laughter] It succeeded in that we had gotten all these high schools to agree to take it. Some schools were getting it, some schools weren't. And I will be honest, we made a whole bunch of rookie errors that a great business leader would not have. We used to send mail by Federal Express, for example, because we thought that that would make it look like we were really like professional.
Meanwhile, your mail, which...
was a great mistake. And then we had hired a printer, actually, the same printing company that was printing Wired magazine at the time. And we were supposed to drop ship. We were moving from black and white to full color and we totally just misestimated what the cost was going to ultimately be, and that was the end of that. But it was one of the great educations of my life, and as a result it helped me, I think, get my little foot in the door of the New York Times when I was 18 years old. I used to read a guy named Stuart Elliott, who was the advertising columnist at the New York Times. He, I mean, he was like a god to me. I mean, most people, you know, read the front page of the paper, the sports section. I would go to like page C6 to read what Stuart had to say. So I could go down to these meetings with the advertising agencies and pretend like I knew what I was talking about. And all I wanted to do was work for this guy. And I was trying to find all these different ways to get into the Times and get to him. And I used to go home during high school and call him on the telephone to try to get a gig. And then finally he took me out to lunch and somehow I convinced him to let me stay. And then there was a guy named Glenn Kramon who was running the business section, and he let me stay. And so I used to come every day with a visitor pass. There was a union at the time, so they didn't really like this whole idea. So they didn't really know about it, actually. I just would come every day and I'd stand and I'd xerox and staple. I had no intention of putting two words together, let alone a sentence. This is 1995, and happily an editor who had no idea how old I was. I was wearing a suit with a tie back then, and she thought I was like a real person, and she assigned me a story to write, and that's how it all started.
No way. Like a mistaken identity thing is how you wrote your first piece at the Times.
I think she thought I was like a young, maybe news clerk graduate from college. She overheard me talking about this thing called the internet back in 1995, and she thought, 'Oh, he may... he seems to know what's going on.'
Do you remember the piece?
Oh, absolutely. It was the silliest piece, but it was... I mean, I love it so much. It was... you're going to laugh. It was a piece about the noise that modems make back when we used to...
where we actually used to write the word modem, a device that transmits data over a phone line. [laughter] And all these adults...
Well, now you need that again. Nobody knows what it is. So...
nobody even knows what... my kids don't know what a modem is. And she wanted to understand what that noise was. That like...
you know, that weird little high-pitch noise.
And I was trying to explain to her that the noise was they were mating... the two modems were talking to each other. [laughter] And that was the first article out of the gate.
So, did you start full-time like...
No, sorry. I went to Cornell. I was going to be like a camp counselor that summer, and then they asked me to stay for the rest of the summer. Then I went off to Cornell, and then at Cornell I would continue writing for the paper, freelance stories and things. And then my junior year I went off to London School of Economics for part of the year and ended up writing a lot in the afternoons because school, as you might imagine, was like over in London at like 2:30 in the afternoon, which was like 9 or 10 in the morning. So I would often be writing articles almost every day, little articles, but it was just a great sort of education for me.
I want to go to the beginning of DealBook. I am still astonished at how early this was in email. I mean, you look at when did Substack start? 2016, 17?
Ben Thompson started writing 2011.
2013, I think it was 2013. Yeah.
I had no idea that DealBook predated all of this.
That was a really remarkable period. So, yeah, it's 2001. I had lived in London after I went to Cornell. I'd been covering mergers and acquisitions, trying to break stories and be as competitive as we could be. I get back to New York. I'm supposed to cover M&A. I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be easy pickings. I thought it was hard in London because the New York Times, you know, wasn't the local paper. And I started to meet bankers and lawyers and people in that whole netherworld, and they'd say, 'Sorkin, you seem like a nice kid, but you know, we get the Times at home and I read the front page, sometimes the sports section, and then I leave it with my wife and I take the Wall Street Journal with me on the train.' And that was like a dagger to the heart. That was like a dagger to the heart. I was like, 'Oh my god, how am I going to make this work?' And I thought, 'Well, you know what? I spend an inordinate amount of time racing around the internet trying to find little bits and nuggets of things, and everybody else is doing the same thing. And if I could put that in a report every day and then effectively almost bypass the physical paper and go straight to their inbox, since they seem to be claiming that they're leaving the paper at home, maybe this is the answer.'
And there had been a history of newsletters on Wall Street, but they were faxes, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you could get all sorts of, you know, analyst reports back then. People would fax the analyst reports for the most part. A lot of stuff was going by fax. In fact, when we first started DealBook, if I remember correctly, there was a number of subscribers who had their, you know, assistants back then, they called them secretaries, call and say, 'Could you fax us DealBook?' That was like a regular thing. 'Could you please fax us DealBook?' And I remember always being like, 'Well, but there are links in it, and if you click on the links, you can read the whole story.' [laughter] And they didn't really get that. So that was the sort of original conceit. And inside The Times, I will say there was sort of support, but sort of marginal, because I think most people didn't understand what we were trying to do. And the other piece was part of the conceit was we were going to link you oftentimes to our competitors. So we were going to provide links to the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, or oftentimes back then there were a lot of local papers that were doing actually incredible business coverage. So, you know, when Lucent was buying Alcatel, or rather I should say Alcatel was buying Lucent, you know, we would translate parts of Les Echos, we would send you to the Trenton Times, give you what they were saying about a deal, or what the local issue was in Dallas if there was something going on in the oil patch or something like that. So we were linking people all over the place and into SEC filings and other things like that. But I think as a newsroom there was a little bit of discomfort, let's just say, about that whole concept for a while.
There must have also been an ad sales and business model question too, right?
Well, in the beginning. So a couple of things. I was really trying to launch this thing in the ashes of what was... this was the dot-com bust had just happened. And it wasn't that we were still in the boom. The bust had happened, and there were real concerns just about the economics of everything. The New York Times actually had what was going to be a tracking stock for its dot-com business, and that looked like it was starting to go off the table, if you will, given what was happening in the marketplace. In any event, their view, I think, if I got to go back and look, I was actually trying to find some of these old notes. I think they thought that the TAM, to put it in a... I don't think we ever used the phrase TAM back then, was 30,000 subscribers [laughter] for free.
And what is it today, if you're willing to share?
Oh, we're over a million. We're over a million subscribers.
This sounds very much like Ben and my own journey. You know, in the early days, we used to be like, oh, there's, you know, there can't be more than 10,000.
There's 10, 20,000 people who will listen to this.
Who would listen to this? Yeah.
[laughter] Yeah. So, you know, and I had this thought that we'd get the whole thing paid for by advertising. I was not looking to, you know, charge for it. Really, the whole goal was to get the brand of the New York Times out in front of this audience more than anything else. And I told them that we were going to make money on day one. I said we would not do this unless we made money on day one. And we did. Our original advertiser was Brooks Brothers, was our first advertiser.
Brooks Brothers is still in business, but only by a hair, I think. I mean, I think they've gone in and out of business a couple of times.
Were you doing the ad sales?
I was not doing the ad sales. So, the good news about the New York Times at that point, and it continues to be the case, but there really is a church-and-state wall between the two. We also had a currency exchange, if I remember, was another advertiser that was one of the early ones. But anyway, within a couple of months, it felt like the thing had sort of caught fire, and all of a sudden there were people who were, you know, sending me emails saying, you know, 'How do I subscribe? I'd like to subscribe.' We get the, as I said, the phone calls from different CEOs saying, 'Can you fax it to my boss?' or whatever it is. And we were off to the races.
Was there a cool dynamic where people who you were covering would subscribe and then would reply to the emails?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was actually... I mean, even to this day, that's the coolest part about it, which is just the audience is so crazy. I mean, some of the names that get it every day, that oftentimes they would reply. I mean, people used to send us, they still do, I get PDFs of decks, you know, about a deal that's going to be coming within two days, or, you know, ahead of time someone's leaking us something, or people are replying to this saying, you know, 'I'm involved in this transaction, and by the way, you didn't get this right. I want to tell you what actually really happened.'
What a great reporting channel, just the replies to...
Yeah. Yeah. No, the replies are a huge... just that immediate feedback that you get, and that actually was a huge sort of plus. I think it's funny now, I think that is so common and normal, but back then, 25 years ago, there was no feedback loop in that way. This really was one of the first because, you know, we didn't have Twitter or X or any of these other social media platforms didn't exist back then. So this was sort of like an original way to do that.
All right. All right, I got to ask, like, what is the meta-game here? What's going on when you do get a reply that said, 'Actually, I'm involved in this deal. You're not getting this right. Here's the real thing.' Obviously, there's an incentive at play to share that with you. How does that enter into how you decide to absorb information when you get it?
So, my view is that every source has some motivation for why they're talking to you. And oftentimes, if not all the time, it is self-motivated, meaning like there is something that they believe benefits them. I think it's important to understand what their motivation is, but ultimately, as long as I can confirm the information, typically from two, three, four different sources, or I can get documentation of the issue, I try not to worry too much about what their ultimate incentives are, because some of the best sources have completely terrible and ulterior motives. I can't tell you how many times I've had people who want to screw somebody else over, even people that you thought were their friends, people in offices that literally were next to each other and [clears throat] somebody's ratting out the other. I had situations where I've talked to board members. I remember an 11-member board, 10 people want to do a deal. One of them thinks the deal is a terrible idea. Thinks if the deal is somehow in the public domain that they're even considering it, the public shareholders will, you know, freak out, rebel, and that will turn on the company. I've had the opposite happen. I've had CEOs who thought that their board was against them, but was convinced that if the public markets understood that they were contemplating this, they would cheer, and the board would actually be sort of put into a corner the opposite way to do a deal.
We just finished recording our Coca-Cola episode. I don't know if you remember this. The CEO of Coca-Cola struck and announced a deal to buy Quaker Oats.
I worked on it that night. I remember that night. I remember that night like it was yesterday.
Yeah. And Quaker Oats owned Gatorade, which was the reason to do it.
The press releases were ready.
The two CEOs did a joint announcement, and then the Coca-Cola board killed it after the announcement. [gasps] Unbelievable. And then Pepsi ended up buying Quaker Oats and Gatorade, and it's been a home run, grand slam for them.
David, I love that you're telling Andrew this. [laughter] I'm pretty sure Andrew knows.
No, but it's a great... No, but it's a great story, and it's an example of just how these things happen where, you know, from the outside it all looks, you know, very organized. Oftentimes you see a big announcement and there's a press release, but behind the scenes invariably there's a lot of different egos and personalities that have their own sort of plans, if you will. And as a reporter, that's where most of the stories come from. Sometimes very senior people, sometimes junior people. By the way, junior people who hate their boss or people who love their boss. It's up and down. I think people have this view that, you know, maybe you talk just to the most senior people. That's typically not the case. Oftentimes a great story starts at a very junior level. Oftentimes a great story starts with... I call it the jilted somebody. So there could be an auction for something. Someone's now lost the auction. Now they're jilted, the jilted lover, and now if they have any incentive in life, you know, they have no skin in the game except maybe to upset the situation. Or maybe there's a banker or a lawyer or an accountant or somebody else who thinks they've spent the last 10 years, you know, sending Christmas cards to some CEO thinking that this is their client, taking them on some, you know, annual conference or ski trip or something, and then all of a sudden finds out that, you know, Goldman Sachs got the business and not them. Well, now they have no skin in the game, and so they may be more inclined to say, 'Hey, Sorkin, you should look into this.' By the way, it's very rare that someone just calls you up and tells you this stuff. But I think if you're sort of like in the flow, calling around, talking about different things, sometimes it just comes up in conversation where, you know, people are maybe willing to say, or it's like one of those, they're having a bad day. You might be talking about something else and you might say, 'What else is going on?' And they might say, 'Well, you know, I got to tell you, I just got totally screwed on this situation. You should check out this other thing because that's, you know,' and that's how a lot of stories like this start.
You get a beat like that. You say, you know, you need to confirm it with two, three, four other sources. How do you decide who to then call next?
Well, then I start to think through, okay, who in my sort of network that I've tried to develop relationships with might know about this before going to the tippy top. I always think if you go straight to the top, you will probably not...
'I know X. Can you confirm or deny?'
Yeah, that doesn't really work. You sort of need to get enough information, usually at lower levels, to know, you know, where the meetings are happening, when they're planning on announcing, what's the price, if it's a stock-for-stock deal, what's the ratio, is there a collar to the ratio. I mean, I always say you want to get 80 to 90% of the way there before asking the company for comment, if you will. And I will say that once you get to 90% of the way there, oftentimes it behooves the company in some ways to tell you what's actually happening at that point.
Yeah. They'd rather have a hand in shaping the narrative versus not.
You know, most companies do want a hand in at least to tell you what's going on. And look, my view is it makes a story stronger. I want to know what folks think. I want to know what folks think in a positive story. I definitely want to know what folks think in a negative story. And, you know, I think it makes it a better story to include whatever the other side of the story is.
Yep. Okay. So that we could talk about this forever. And I'm interested in part because David and I don't think about ourselves as journalists, and yet we have a lot of the same... what we do rhymes as sort of this business historians, even though we're not, just doing it about the past, not the... [laughter] But it's similar, you know, different people remember things very differently, as you know, you know, you're a historian too.
Well, it's very interesting to try to think back. I mean, I just finished this 1929 book...
which is fantastic, by the way. I'm in the middle of it. For anyone who hasn't read it yet or listened, it's great, by the way. I love that you narrate it too in the audiobook.
You guys are in the audiobook. I'd never done anything like that before. But what I was going to say is, stories about today, you can go obviously talk to people who are involved in them and they can give you their perspective in the moment. Stories 100 years ago, you know, you're dependent on letters and diaries and memos and notes and all this archival material, which you guys have unearthed a whole number of times when you guys have been working on projects around companies that, you know, have lengthy histories. I always try to put myself in the shoes of the people who are living, and I found myself trying to put myself in the shoes of the people who were not living back then. What would they be thinking? Why would they be thinking it? How would that relate to somebody who's alive today? I don't know if you guys ever think about that, but...
We definitely try to... modernize is the wrong word, but like make these characters real, you know, talk about them, reenact conversations like in the way that people would naturally have them today as opposed to, you know, you read a history book and it sounds very stilted. Trying to think of an example. Maybe like Standard Oil. It really is like incredible drama, right? And like ruthless stuff that's happening. And there's a way to talk about that in the language they were using at the time that might be a little less accessible today. And there's a way to talk about it of like, 'You're not going to believe what Henry Flagler did next. Like, what an animal that guy,' you know? [laughter]
All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank one of our favorite companies, Shopify.
Yes. And this is really fun because we have been friends and fans of Shopify for years. We just had Tobi on ACQ2 to talk about everything going on in AI and everything that has happened at Shopify in the six years now since we covered the company on Acquired.
It's been a pretty insane transformation for them.
Yeah. So, back at their IPO, Shopify was the go-to platform for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get online. What's happened since is that is still true. And Shopify has also become the world's leading commerce platform for enterprises of any size, period.
Yeah. So, what's so cool about the company is how they've managed to scale without losing their soul. Even though companies like Everlane and Vori and even older established companies like Mattel are doing billions of revenue on Shopify, the company's mission is still the same as the day Tobi founded it: to create a world where more entrepreneurs exist.
Oh, yeah. Ben, you got to tell everyone your favorite enterprise brand that is on Shopify.
Oh, I'm saving that for next episode. I have a whole thing planned for episode two of [laughter] this season.
Okay. Okay, great. Anyway, the reason enterprises are now also using Shopify is simple. Because businesses of all sizes just sell more with Shopify. They built this incredible ecosystem where you can sell everywhere. Obviously, your own site. That's always been true. But now with Shopify, you can easily sell on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, Roku, ChatGPT, Perplexity, anywhere. Plus, with Shop Pay, their accelerated checkout, you get amazing conversion, and it has a built-in user base of 200 million people who have their payment information already stored with it. Shopify is the ultimate example of not doing what doesn't make your beer taste better. Even if you're a huge brand, you're not going to build a better e-commerce platform for your product. But that is what Tobi and Shopify's entire purpose is. So, you should use them.
Yes. So, whether you're just getting started or already at huge scale, head on over to shopify.com/acquired. That's shopify.com/acquired. And just tell them that Ben and David sent you.
Well, Andrew, I was going to ask you, how many years was it of the newsletter before starting the DealBook Summit?
So we started the summit in 2011, in fact. So we'd basically been doing it 10 years, 10 years in. And really the summit was just the idea of can we bring the pages of DealBook to life, right? Could we actually take all of these characters who we were writing about every day, who oftentimes were replying to us on the email, and put them on a stage and talk to them in a really human way so that people could and the public could sort of see them and see the way they think about the big issues of the day. That's... I always love conversations about ultimately why people think what they think, less about... I mean, I care about, you know, the information they're imparting, but I feel like especially when you think about people of great influence and power and all of that, even if you disagree with them, understanding why they think what they think, I think has huge value just to our collective understanding.
I've thought that watching the last few years of DealBook Summit interviews, I mean, whether it's Elon or Sundar or Jeff Bezos, it's not like they're sitting there breaking news. It's not an act of reporting to do the summit, but you really do get inside the psyche. You get a much richer texture of why they're doing what they're doing from an hour-long interview.
A lot of them go between a half hour and an hour. And in terms of the reporting, you're right. It's not, you know, oftentimes news of the moment, though sometimes they do make news in that moment that make headlines.
Alex Cooper dropped her energy drink.
She did. She did. But to me, ultimately, it's reporting that ends up explaining what they did in the past and oftentimes gets used later in what they do in the future. So sometimes you'll see little nuggets, little quotes, little other things that end up in the newspaper, you know, six months later after they've announced something else that they're doing or something happens, and those quotes are used as a way to explain them.
You know, it's funny. I haven't had a chance to read today's DealBook yet, but I'm very curious in the story that you helped report around Jeff Bezos's new venture that I saw just a headline of this morning. Does that call back at all to your interview with him where he's talking about all the heavy industry that they want to move off Earth and what's going to be necessary to accomplish all that?
Yes. And yes, because he made a particular point of leaning into AI, and I remember being a little surprised about sort of his interest in artificial intelligence and how he clearly wanted to talk more and more about artificial intelligence. And I remember thinking to myself, well, you know, Amazon doesn't have its own large language model right now. You know, arguably it's behind. I mean, I think a lot of people thought that at the time. And here's a guy who says he's focused on space. So why is he all of a sudden talking about AI and talking about how he thinks AI is like fire? I remember him saying he thinks it's, you know, it's that important. So last night when I learned about this, I thought, 'Oh, okay. This all makes a little bit more sense now.' Well, and he's going to become the co-CEO of the company, which to me is remarkable because he was not the CEO of Blue Origin. He was the founder, but he had hired someone to be the CEO. And the last time he'd been the CEO of a company obviously was Amazon. So the idea that this is what he's effectively doubling down on and where he's going to focus his own personal energy, I think is pretty interesting.
When you were starting the summit back in 2011, did you think about it as like, we have this amazing readership and engagement of people replying, and like, let's bring it to life, let's make something really amazing around this? Or did you think about it as like, hey, there are a bunch of these business summits out there to varying degrees of great, and maybe there's an opportunity for us to become the premier version of this?
