Serena Williams, Jerome H. Powell, Jeff Bezos and other leaders across business and technology discussed artificial intelligence, inflation, the media and what the world would look like under a second Donald J. Trump presidency.
Mr. Bezos, for one, thinks the president-elect has “a good chance of succeeding.”
Elon Musk wasn’t in the room, but he was present throughout at the DealBook Summit. The speakers were largely optimistic about his efforts in the new administration.
The event, hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, founder of DealBook, has taken place since 2011.
Here are five main themes:
Inflation is still an issue, but there’s a chance for growth.
Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said the economy was in a “very good place.” Inflation has come down, and the labor market has rebounded. The big takeaway for investors: The central bank can afford to be more cautious when it considers lowering interest rates, Mr. Powell said. (The next Fed meeting will be Dec. 17-18.)
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel and a top donor to the Republican Party, placed the blame for inflation squarely on the Biden administration, which, he argued, “put this country on an inflationary path that was unprecedented in our lifetime.” Mr. Powell has “had to deal with cleaning up the mess,” he added.
Former President Bill Clinton said inflation was the “fundamental problem” that helped Mr. Trump return to the White House.
“The average person had not really lived through something like this for 40 years, since the ’70s,” Mr. Clinton said.
What will Trump 2.0 mean for the economy?
Most of the speakers showed enthusiasm for Mr. Trump’s second term, but added cautionary comments. Mr. Powell addressed the big question hanging over his upcoming term: Can the Trump administration break with norms, and chip away at Fed independence? Mr. Powell gave an emphatic no. The central bank, he said, was created by Congress and “it’s the law of the land,” granting it independence. Mr. Powell said he did not think Congress would change that.
Mr. Griffin defended the bank’s independence, saying it’s “extraordinarily important to the sanctity of the dollar.” The hedge fund titan, who had previously derided Mr. Trump as a “three-time loser,” sat on the sidelines for the Trump campaign, but he said he was happy that Mr. Trump had prevailed.
Mr. Griffin downplayed one of the biggest concerns about Trumponomics — that Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China could dent growth and accelerate inflation. “We are literally months or years away from knowing where that lands,” he said.
David Ricks, the chair and chief executive of the drugmaker Eli Lilly, defended the importance of the Food and Drug Administration in light of recent attacks by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s pick to lead his administration’s health care efforts. “I think that’s a value to society we need to keep,” he said of the agency’s work in reviewing drugs.
Mr. Ricks took the stage with Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She spoke about the potentially transformative effect of weight-loss drugs on America’s obesity epidemic, with 75 percent of the population overweight of having obesity.
Jeff Bezos, who showed up in a casual black sweater and dark jeans, said Mr. Trump had “grown” over the past eight years. “He is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled.” That’s a stark change from how the founder of Amazon saw him in his first term.
Why the change? Echoing Mr. Griffin, Mr. Bezos said the country had been stifled by too much red tape and government oversight. “President Trump is serious about the regulatory agenda — and I think he has a good chance of succeeding,” he said.
Where does the media go from here?
Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, angered readers when he canceled a planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. He again defended that call.
“I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly,” he said, before adding that he understood the blowback.
The Post is still losing money, but Mr. Bezos said he had “a bunch of ideas,” on how to fix the paper. He didn’t offer any details.
Speaking of billionaire newspaper owners … Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, talked about his lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids for hacking his phone. It’s about “accountability, it’s really that simple,” he said, citing the bigger issue — that the misconduct of some journalists was undermining trust in all journalists.
“I will be damned if those journalists are going to ruin journalism for everybody else, because we depend on it so much,” he said.
When it comes to media reports, Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam tennis champion and managing partner of Serena Ventures, said she did not read articles about herself and when she watched tennis, “I always have it on mute.”
“I decided to, before mental health was a thing, just to take care of my own mental health and just take a giant step from that,” she added.
But media can still be a form of therapy. Alex Cooper, the host of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast and founder of the Unwell Network, who interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential run, said she was made for the podcasting business.
Ms. Cooper, who arrived in a short, black wool shift dress, said after she was fired from her job out of college, she saw a hole in the market. “There’s Howard Stern, and there’s no one where women can actually feel like, ‘Oh, that is what I talk about with my friends when I’m behind closed doors,’” she said.
She reportedly signed a $125 million contract with SiriusXM. For some context, when Mr. Bezos bought The Post in 2013, he paid $250 million.
Artificial general intelligence could happen sooner than we think.
Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence start-up, played down the threat posed by the emerging technology, but he talked excitedly about the possibility of the next leap.
Mr. Altman’s big goal is to achieve what is known as artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is basically a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. It could arrive sooner than people expect, and significantly accelerate economic growth.
“There’s a ton of hard work, a ton of research and engineering still to do, but I think it’s possible.”
His pronouncement could also be strategic. Microsoft, OpenAI’s main partner, has an exclusive license to reuse OpenAI’s tech in its own products, which expires once Mr. Altman’s company reaches the milestone.
The New York Times Company has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. Mr. Altman, who comes off as genial and thoughtful, said The Times was “on the wrong side of history in many ways.”
On the other hand, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, expects the pace of A.I. development to actually slow in 2025.
Google is seen as facing an innovator’s dilemma in generative A.I., since its search dominance could be displaced by chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He took a rare shot at Microsoft, whose chief executive, Satya Nadella, has lambasted Google for not having built an insurmountable lead in generative A.I., despite making strides in the technology long before its rivals.
“I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time,” he said.
The other buzzy tech story of the year — cryptocurrencies — was also on some speakers’ mind. They were not as bullish as the Bitcoin market rally would suggest.
You can’t avoid Elon Musk.
Mr. Musk wasn’t in the DealBook Summit speaker lineup (that was last year), but he was still present.
Mr. Griffin called him “one of the great entrepreneurs of our lifetime,” while Mr. Altman described him as a “mega hero.” Mr. Clinton saw Mr. Musk’s growing influence in President-elect Trump’s inner circle as a sign of the times.
But Mr. Musk’s role in Mr. Trump’s administration could have an effect on his competitors. For example, he’s suing Mr. Altman’s company, arguing that OpenAI and two of its founders, Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, breached the company’s founding contract by putting commercial interests ahead of the public good.
“It would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon has it to hurt your competitors,” Mr. Altman said.
Mr. Bezos, who runs Blue Origin, which competes with Mr. Musk’s SpaceX, said he was taking “at face value” that the Tesla founder would not use his relationship with Mr. Trump to hurt his rivals. He also complimented Mr. Musk on his efforts to cut government costs.
“I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I very rarely have been taken advantage of as a result,” he said. “Why be cynical about that?”
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