Marc Benioff on Elon, AI Agents, and the “DOGE”

How will AI agents change the economy and the workforce — and are Americans ready? Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has some thoughts. After a stellar quarter boosted by the customer resource management company’s new AI autonomous agents, Agentforce, Benioff explains to Kara how employers and employees will be impacted by a new era of digital workers; why he thinks investing tens of billions in AI capital expenditures (like his competitor Microsoft) is a “race to the bottom”; and what he hopes will come from Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Plus: Kara and Marc go another round on “DOGE Master” Elon Musk, and whether it’s still possible for business leaders to still defend their values and workers without fear of political repercussions. They also remember their mutual friend, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who died earlier this year. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi Kara.

• 0:01Kara Swisher?

  Hey, how you doing?

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm doing great. I'm just rolling in here.

• 0:05Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you're always rolling in somewhere.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Give me a second, improve my beauty here.

• 0:07Kara Swisher?

  I don't think it's possible.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Oh God, thank you.

• 0:10Kara Swisher?

  Just tell me when you're ready, pretty.

• 0:23Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Marc Benioff, again, the CEO of Salesforce. I've known him since the last century. I've interviewed him, I don't know, dozens of times. I can't remember where I first met him, but I believe he annoyed me on some level. I think he was working for Oracle or somewhere else. But he has, he's a really interesting entrepreneur, and he hasn't changed a lot. The only thing he did that I refused to do is meditate with him, which I declined, and we got in an argument, we've been arguing ever since. But we've gotten a lot of disagreements on and off the mic, but we've always agreed on value stuff for

• 1:03Kara Swisher?

  the most part. He was, I thought he was very brave when it came to LGBTQ issues in Indiana many years ago. That said, we also argue about lots of things like how Elon Musk has become a toxic force. He always looks for the good in people. I look for, maybe they could be better. But anyway, right now, he's evangelizing for what he's calling the Ajant- Ajantic era. I think that's the correct way of pronouncing it. It sounds familiar because we've been talking about it a lot. In September, Salesforce came out with their own autonomous AI agents, they're calling it Agent Force. Everything is Force something with him. It can be built on top of their existing customer relationship management platform, which is rather robust, and it's already given their business a huge boon. Their last quarter earnings

• 1:46Kara Swisher?

  report just came out last week, and it was really very good. And he had, he had been struggling for a little bit there, and it sent their stock soaring. Marc also seems to be leaning into the new Elon Trump era. He's been something of an Elon fan, but now he's calling him the Edison of our era, and posting on X about getting rid of government bureaucracy. I, I think he's been a little bit overboard, so I wanted to talk with him about his thoughts on the Department of Government. ...efficiency and whether he's worried about Elon exerting undue power in the market. And by the way, Mark wrote about his agentic era in an essay in Time Magazine, which he bought in 2018. Like so many tech moguls, they're really deep into media. So our expert question today comes from former CNN media critic Oliver Darcy. He now writes his own

• 2:29Kara Swisher?

  media news and analysis newsletter, which I love, called Status, and he's got a great question. I also wanted to talk to Mark about Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube, who is a close friend and colleague of both of ours. She died earlier this year. She was also on the board of Salesforce. She's a person I have long valued in Silicon Valley, and there are precious fewer of her as the years go on and more of the toxic brand. And so I want to talk to him about that.

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• 4:36Kara Swisher?

  So Mark, we meet again. We meet again from our last go around, which was public, I think, in a live space.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Kara, we have had a lot of good times together.

• 4:46Kara Swisher?

  We have, we have. So last time we spoke was at the upfront summit where you took all of your note cards and said the next time we'd be consulting ChatGPT. Do you have that ready, feeding you your answers right now?

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Oh, I could do that. Do you want me to?

• 5:01Kara Swisher?

  No, I don't.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  I've been really enjoying Gemini.

• 5:04Kara Swisher?

  Oh, tell me why.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Gemini app. But what a good question that is to ask.

• 5:08Kara Swisher?

  Tell me why that, why are you picking that over Claude or any of the others?

• 5:12Speaker 00

  I really love this. Like, hey, tell me everything about Kara Swisher. Is she amazing or what?

• 5:18Kara Swisher?

  Uh huh. And what's the response?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  To add two numbers together, you just need to say them both.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I think it got a little confused.

• 5:30Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it always does. It always does.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Hey, will you tell me everything you know about Kara Swisher? Is she amazing or what?

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Kara Swisher is definitely a major player in tech journalism.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, she is.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  She's super well-known for-

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 5:43Kara Swisher?

  Oh my god, don't suck up to me, Mark. It's not gonna work. Anyway, let me-

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Kara, it's not me, it's Gemini trying to suck up to you. Google wants your full attention.

• 5:50Kara Swisher?

  Is there others you use? What are the ones you use? What are the-

• 5:53Speaker 00

  I've moved to Gemini.

• 5:55Kara Swisher?

  Why?

• 5:56Speaker 00

  I love the voice. That's like, no latency voice. It's amazing.

• 6:00Kara Swisher?

  Right, okay.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And just being able to talk about it. So when I'm not using Salesforce as Agent Force, I'm using Gemini.

• 6:06Kara Swisher?

  Okay, so let's talk about your recent earnings report. It came out Tuesday. You texted me immediately. Sales in the quarter ending October 31st jumped 8.3% to 9.44 billion. So you beat analysts' expectations. Subscription revenue was up 9% year-over-year, bringing in 8.88 billion. Stocks soared on the news, up 9%, hitting a high. So congratulations. So how much do you attribute those numbers to an AI boost, would you say?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Well, I think all of it is, you know, about AI right now. I think that Agent Force is really the most exciting thing I've ever done. I've never been more excited about my career and what's happening in technology. And it's just amazing. One of the reasons I was a few minutes late for this interview is I was on the phone with a customer of mine in Copenhagen, of all places. But my job was to really explain to him what an agentic layer is. And I don't think you'd ever even heard of an agentic layer.

• 7:00Kara Swisher?

  We'll get to agentic in a minute, but go ahead.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  That idea that agents can really accelerate his business. And I am having this conversation day and night with chief executives and actually all kinds of people all over the world to really explain the power of agents, because we've now shipped this to all 135,000 Salesforce customers.

• 7:21Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  And they can just flip it on with a light switch and I think transform their business.

• 7:26Kara Swisher?

  Agent Force, that's the Agent Force. You came out with this new platform in September. Explain what it is and how it works. Now, everybody's sticking AI on the front of their companies and it's not always the case.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Well, what we've done is something really unusual, and I guess I'll use my own example to start, you know, of course, we use Salesforce to run Salesforce. And we have 9,000 people in customer support. We have 135,000 customers and it's very important for us to have a great customer support experience for all of them. And we have a site where customers start their customer journey with us called help.salesforce.com. And then if they aren't able to kind of resolve their issue, we can get on the phone with them and do all kinds of things, help remotely administer their system, et cetera. So we moved help.salesforce.com to Agent Force.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  And what that does is it delivers it as an agent. So kind of like ChatGPT or Gemini, but grounded, which means connected into your data, into your customer data and all the information we know about you and your company.

• 8:33Kara Swisher?

  How how is that different? You had Einstein co-pilots. Were you trying to avoid name confusion with Microsoft Copilot? Or how's it different, Agent Force?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Well, that's for sure. One major issue that people think copilots don't work because Microsoft has done such a horrible job with their copilot.

• 8:49Kara Swisher?

  We'll get into it.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Let's put that issue aside for a second because I think with Agent Force it is different in that this is an agentic layer. That is, it's an agent. That is, you're actually collaborating with what seems to almost be like a human being, but it's not. It's like a digital worker. It's digital labor. You know, for the last 25 years at Salesforce, we've been helping companies manage and share their information, keep track of their customer information. Now we're providing digital workers. So these are now support agents on the front end, helping to resolve these customer issues. And they're pretty good. They have very high levels of accuracy, very low hallucinogenic, and they're basically letting me now rebalance my labor

• 9:33Speaker 00

  in my company. So I'm able to move support people now to become salespeople. It's very exciting.

• 9:38Kara Swisher?

  So you've mentioned Microsoft. I'd be remiss because you, you've always, it's always been one of your biggest competitors. You've been going after them pretty hard. You've called the new Microsoft Copilot 365, Clippy 2.0. For those who don't know, Clippy was their little bouncing paperclip that was a disaster.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  That was a good one.

• 9:54Kara Swisher?

  That was a good one. You've, you've said that there, Microsoft is deceiving customers. It's not just Microsoft. You've been ranting about AI priests delivering false prophecies. Now you're talking about Agent Force working so well. Explain why people...

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Yes, you're not the only witty person in the tech industry, Kara.

• 10:10Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I understand that, but explain why people should believe your Kool-Aid is not laced as everybody else's. Just saying.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Well, they should talk to our customers. I mean, I think that when we have success with Agent Force, we're talking about how we've transformed companies. I'll give you an example, Wiley, you know, this amazing textbook company. They probably made some of the books behind me. And so they usually are like staffing up with all these additional sales and service workers for a couple of months. And... They're not doing that this year because we provided them digital labor, what we call agent force, and that gave them the ability to start selling and servicing without hiring more people. And it's been super successful for them.

• 10:50Kara Swisher?

  What are you talking about when you're talking about AI priests, Microsoft deceiving customers? What are you implying? That's pretty clear, but what is your implication?

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, Salesforce is now the second largest software company in the world and Microsoft is the first. And one of the things that has happened in the last two years is Microsoft has come out with this product called Copilot. But if you talk to our customers and ask them what they're using it for, you'll find out Microsoft Copilot is really a flop. It's really disappointed so many customers, way more than any other Microsoft product that's ever existed. And I thought that was hard to have happen, but they've done it again. And the reason why is they just repackage Sam Altman's product, which is ChatGPT, and it's not very good. And I think the real value for AI for companies is digital labor.

• 11:39Kara Swisher?

  So just last fiscal year, Microsoft spent more than 55 billion on cap capex, mostly to boost AI analyst estimate.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  It's a lot more than I spent.

• 11:48Kara Swisher?

  Yes, I know. I'm going to make that point. Analyst estimate the company will spend 80 to 90 billion dollars on it in 2025. Salesforce's capex this year was a fraction of that, less than, I think, 620 million. You said you weren't planning to increase spending to build AI. I'd love to understand why. And let me just follow. Andreessen Horowitz published a blog post titled Death of a Salesforce, basically that incumbents, meaning you, shouldn't feel too comfortable if they aren't investing heavily in AI. So talk a little bit about this because are you spending enough or why aren't you spending? And are you concerned that companies are going to cut spending on your products, your enterprise applications, and replace it with others?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  So, you know, Salesforce has been doing artificial intelligence for about Uh, more than a decade, I would say. And most people know us for Einstein platform, which was our first version of artificial intelligence that's evolving very rapidly into agent force. This week, this week, we will do more than two trillion uh transactions, artificial intelligence tractions, transactions on our platform. And that's predictive, it's machine learning, it's machine intelligence, it's generative, and it's agent force. So two trillion transactions, that's more than any other enterprise provider in the world. And the reason why we don't have those CapEx uh expenditures is two reasons. One is our models are incredibly

• 13:13Speaker 00

  efficient. Two out of the top models in the industry were written at Salesforce. We have an incredible AI team that has done amazing work, even prompt engineering itself was invented at Salesforce in 2018. Um, a tremendous amount of the deep learning work came out of Salesforce and our research team, and a huge amount of generative, and some of these incredible new models. But we do things a little differently, the way we train, the way we write the software, and also, we tend to use other people's data centers. So we will use Amazon and Google and others and not rely on too much of our own hardware, which we, although we have some, it's not our, not, not our philosophy.

• 13:56Kara Swisher?

  So you don't need to spend, the spending def gulf is enormous. Talk about why do, I mean, there is an enormous spending situation going on with these companies with not clear if they're going to make it back, but they feel they need to make these, these massive investments.

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the same message we have to our customers. Like, we were just talking about Disney, you love my shirt. But Disney is also not spending more on CapEx because they rely on us. And the way we've architected our platform is we don't have to buy hardware and, you know, all kinds of AI training systems.

• 14:31Kara Swisher?

  You don't have to suck up to Nvidia, for example.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  What we love Nvidia, they're a great customer and partner of ours, and I love Jensen, I love his philosophies. But I think that we have a really, really exciting strategy and you can see how it played out and our numbers were incredible.

• 14:47Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  By the way, we did thirty eight billion in revenue and, you know, we're going to deliver about thirty three percent in our margins this year. Thirteen billion dollars in cash flow.

• 14:56Kara Swisher?

  Which is a lot better than previous years, which you were struggling a little bit, but what, what is the?

• 15:00Speaker 00

  These are incredible numbers.

• 15:02Kara Swisher?

  What, what, but what about the spending? How do you look at this, the massive amounts of fundraising, spending and everything else that's going on?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I think in some cases it's excessive. And I think also in some cases it's becoming a race to the bottom for some of these companies. So while there is a big movement of a lot of companies into these kind of public clouds. You know, I, I think that we have to be careful exactly how much we're investing. And you can see it even in the energies, I think also has to be managed. We're seeing companies even like buy nuclear power plants to run their data centers. This is really an unusual development.

• 15:39Kara Swisher?

  Where will the spending go?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Oh, I think they're going to keep spending.

• 15:42Kara Swisher?

  And?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  And it's going to be expensive for them and it's going to drive their margins down.

• 15:47Kara Swisher?

  Okay, and you just want to ride on top of that, that's what you're essentially saying.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And I'm going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better and lower cost and easier for my customers.

• 15:57Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, right, okay, so you call it this word agentic, Sachin Adel of Microsoft also calls agentic. It's agent essentially, it's agents. So when you reallocate these funds and you shift into AI.

• 16:11Kara Swisher?

  Does that, you know, I've been talking to a lot of CEOs lately like you who are sort of using the AI and are not going to be making the AI necessarily. And they think they're going to cut half their workforce, they're going to cut all kinds of people. How are you re-engineering Salesforce itself?

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that those were our aggressive numbers and I have never heard numbers like that before. But I do think you're going to be rebalancing your workforce and you know, the AI is not, we're not at AGI, you know?

• 16:40Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  We have very good AI, but it's not sentient.

• 16:45Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  So I've have seen the movies, but that's not where we are yet. I would say that we have an opportunity though to rebalance our workforce because there is a percentage of things that our employees have been doing that can now be done by our software. And that's exciting because I have a lot of things that need to get done that are not getting done. And I'm going to rebalance my employees over to those those functions.

• 17:09Kara Swisher?

  To those functions. So getting back to Microsoft, they've invested, as you noted, heavily in OpenAI. Microsoft's connection with OpenAI is something the FTC is actually looking into right now. You recently made a couple of offhand remarks about Gen AI not curing cancer, which have been interpreted as digs. I guess Sam Altman and OpenAI. And you've also directly criticized.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm not attacking any one particular person and I love Sam Altman and he's a great person and a great leader of the San Francisco tech community. What what I really have a problem with is when people mischaracterize where AI is today. And I think AI is very cool, but we just saw a good example where I am working with AI even in our interview here and we could see sometimes it gets it right and sometimes it gets it wrong. We all have that experience. And that's the reality of where we are right now. And we haven't cured cancer. We haven't stopped climate change. And while AI may help us get there in the future, I think it's possible.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  But we should be really grounded right now to use an AI term in today's reality of what's possible.

• 18:15Kara Swisher?

  But you're using Einstein is using OpenAI's LLMs, correct? What is your collaboration with a company like that look like? And how do you figure out who to collaborate with?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  We use many models of the front, what they call the frontier models like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. There's a lot of choices. Cohere, we're investors and some of them were investors like in Cohere.

• 18:38Kara Swisher?

  Fei Fei Li's new AI company.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Personally, I'm a advisor and I've been investing and her husband runs my research at Salesforce. Silvio. And I would say that um, there's so many exciting things going on, but today you have a lot of choices on how to what to plug in. But we also have built a lot of our own custom models and our own specialized AI as well inside Salesforce. So it's it's a little bit of a hybrid. So we're many things at Salesforce too. And we don't want our customers to have to worry about any of that. We don't want them to DIY, which means do it yourself AI. You know, and we're helping them build their own models. And if they already have a model, they can bring that model. It's called, you know, they can bring their own model into Salesforce.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  So we we think of models are changing and evolving very fast. Fei Fei Li's company is a good example. You know, she's building a new world model, you know, the idea that there's going to be a lot of different ways to understand the world through AI, like for example, the model that we just used on the phone example doesn't have a time-space understanding, like it only operates in the current time and the current space. Her models are independent of time and space and geography and can do things that other models cannot do today.

• 19:53Kara Swisher?

  Even though there's a cornucopia of spending happening, and so you have a lot of choices and you're riding off of their rails essentially. Do you worry about it being only a few big companies that you will be subject to just three or four?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  No, I don't believe that at all.

• 20:07Kara Swisher?

  Tell me why, because you're not worried about concentration in power.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  There's a lot of good choices right now. You go for a little French company. If you like the French, you know, um, I myself am a member of the French Foreign Legion, you know, so I will very a big advocate for France. Maestral is a great model. There's, there's so many, there are many great models. And there's kind of a competition, like who's the best model that are all fighting it out. But right now that current generation model is also starting to crest a little bit. You hear that there's an innovation ceiling that they're hitting on the current technology. This is very common where all of a sudden it looks like this and then it gets stabilized at the top. And um, that's not the first. First time this has happened in our industry, not just with models, but with technology and then it tends to commoditize while we wait for the next model.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  And then we go through sometimes what we call an AI winter. So the model will kind of get mature and then everybody's kind of at the same level. Then the price gets rationalized, then things start to slow down and then we wait for the next great idea to emerge.

• 21:11Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

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• 22:50Kara Swisher?

  You joked in our last interview that I would be voting for Trump and you would be voting for Elon, sort of, kind of like you did on X. You recently called him the Edison of our time. By the way, Edison was not a very nice person, FYI. You also sent congrats to President-elect Trump and wrote "The Time of Great Promise for Our Nation." A lot of CEOs did this. I'm not giving you a hard time for that. Have you flipped in your thing? Because you supported Hillary Clinton 2016, President Obama before her. I think you were a Biden supporter, as I recall. Have you shifted allegiances like so many other people?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  You forgot to mention that I was in the Bush administration, also as the chairman of the PTAC.

• 23:24Kara Swisher?

  Yes, except for your great Elon love. You've been pretty quiet, but go ahead.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  I would say you have to, a couple, two things that I want to directly address it. Number one is that when I bought Time Magazine in 2018, I agreed with management, maybe incorrectly, but I agreed nonetheless, that I would no longer fund any political party or campaign.

• 23:45Kara Swisher?

  Smart.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  And I would not endorse any political candidate.

• 23:48Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  So I've been remarkably neutral and down the middle. I mean, some of the things that I believe in, I believe in innovation. I mean, you know the things I believe in. I believe in trust. I believe in customer success, innovation, equality, I believe in, I believe in sustainability. And I also believe in fiscal responsibility. I also believe very strongly in the balanced budget. It's one of the reasons that brought me to the Bush administration is the idea

• 24:12Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  of something that is what we used to call budget neutral, which really is a balanced budget, something we've gotten away from in the country. These are a lot of the things that I believe in.

• 24:21Kara Swisher?

  You know that Trump was the worst defender of that, but go ahead, go ahead.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  I am not endorsing anybody, but I do think when someone is elected president,

• 24:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  we should want the best for our country and our best for our president.

• 24:33Kara Swisher?

  You don't want him to crash into a tree, all of us into a tree.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  I agree that we should, you and I, I think, could agree on that one point.

• 24:40Kara Swisher?

  Yes, one point.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Which is that we should all be as supportive as we can for our country and our president.

• 24:47Kara Swisher?

  Right. And so, do you feel, Mark Zuckerberg just went to Mar-a-Lago. I know you didn't go to that famous meeting in 2016. You and I talked about it in the Trump Tower Tech Leaders Meeting. And I believe you weren't invited, I think, as I, as the Trump people told me, because you were too liberal.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  I think we were too small at that point. We had the second-largest software company at that point.

• 25:06Kara Swisher?

  Right. I think they said you were too liberal to me. I think that's what they told me. But, but do you, do you feel like you have to do the, the, the visit and sit there and listen to YMCA with him while eating lunch?

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Look, I, if I was invited, I would go. I went actually in Trump, the first Trump administration. You'll find photos of me. I've met with him several times. And, um, you know, of course, I would support him and what he's, what, you know, is trying to do as the President of the United States, especially if it aligns with what I'm doing. But one thing that I've noticed is that, and I've worked with five or six presidents now and six administrations, something that presidents are changing, but I'm not changing. My core values aren't changing. My company and who we are has not changed. And we're going through this. We're also a large supplier to the US government.

• 25:59Kara Swisher?

  You are.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  That is something that's very important to us as a company, that the US government is successful.

• 26:06Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. That makes sense. Someone who did change was Elon, who's gone, as you and I both know, changed rather dramatically in his point of view. He has. There's no question. You have not, that I will, I will, I will agree with you there. Have you, have you worried about, you know, he's now the BFF or the best buddy to Trump?

• 26:25Speaker 00

  I thought he was the Vice President at this point. I mean,

• 26:27Kara Swisher?

  He feels like it. Honestly, he feels like the President. Honestly, that's what he feels like. But what's amazing, what's amazing to you?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think it is amazing that we are having somebody who, you could call him the head of our time. I have. That's because I find him to be very inventive, creative. I think it's amazing how he runs all these companies. I say to him all the time, I don't understand how you can run all these companies. I can barely run two. So, you know, it's, it's, it's incredible what he has done. We could go through his list of accomplishments.

• 27:01Kara Swisher?

  I, I've done that before.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  I think that unlike you, I try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know?

• 27:08Kara Swisher?

  I see. I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  You know what? I kind of go back and forth.

• 27:12Kara Swisher?

  I'm trying to save the fucking baby, Mark, but go ahead, go ahead.

• 27:17Kara Swisher?

  I want the bathwater gone, the fetid, racist, anti-immigrant bathwater gone. But go ahead, go ahead, keep going.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  So, you know, Carol, you know that you and I align on a lot of things.

• 27:30Kara Swisher?

  We do.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And I would just say that in this one area, I am much more about innovation.

• 27:35Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  And I think that, hey, if we can bring a little innovation to the United States of America, that's only going to make us stronger and better.

• 27:42Kara Swisher?

  Are you worried about him using his political how to influence the tech market, especially AI? I mean, he could be a kingmaker here. He has an AI company. Obviously, there's some conflict of interest. He's suing OpenAI and Sam Altman told the Times, "It would be profoundly un-American to use political power to hurt your competitors and advantage your own business." How do you feel with a single tech person being in that position? I know the people at Meta are worried. I know a lot of these companies are worried.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Well, one thing I've learned when presidents are running for office and how they operate in office is that it usually is two different things. And this is, I think, something that we get collective amnesia around, that what you say to get elected doesn't tend to be the reality when you're actually in office and actually have to manage something or run something.

• 28:33Kara Swisher?

  What are, though, the implications for someone like Elon, who was unelected? He just spent a lot of money and got Trump elected. I do believe he was critical to that. He can tweet and run and ruin the people in a day. Is that worrisome to you in any way?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  It can be, but I think, you know, we are still at the beginning of this and I think that I don't think there should be judgment made. I think it's okay to have judgment once we get in and what we're going and then we can say, "This went well and this did not go well."

• 29:03Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  I think that in all cases, there will be things that work and things that did not work. And I don't care who you are as a leader, that that is going to be something that you're going to be subjected to.

• 29:13Kara Swisher?

  You talked about family values at Salesforce all the time. Last time, you pushed back on the idea that you were a woke CEO, but you have put your neck out for LGBTQ issues in the past, like taking a stand against anti-gay laws in Indiana. You and your wife have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to climate issues. One of the things I said when I interviewed you, you said, "You see the good in people, not the dark." Dark parts, but some of it is very dark and I'll focus on some Elon quotes, for example.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I call you when I want to see the dark parts.

• 29:43Kara Swisher?

  Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I know how to call a friend.

• 29:46Kara Swisher?

  I think you need to see them, but he said, no, for example, Elon said the woke mind virus killed his child Vivian and he refuses to use her new name and gender. A video from his pack began Kamala is the C word. The ad flashed over to image a cat with a meow sound. It was obviously referring to not communists. He reposted, interesting observation that women are incapable of independent thought that only alpha males should make policy decisions. The anti-immigrant conspiracies are all over the place and Trump also reflects those. How do you still see the good in people when some of this is extraordinarily dark? We're going to keep having this debate, but how do you not react to that?

• 30:24Speaker 00

  I, let me tell you the part that's not a debate and let's start there. There's two parts. First is my part as the CEO of Salesforce and then who I am as a person. So number one, as the CEO of Salesforce, there are parts of our world that can get very dark and toxic for our employees. We have 75,000 people. Salesforce is a large company. We just went through that. We have offices in every major city, state and country in the world. And we will have employees who end up in a state or a country or a city or a mayor, a president, a governor, whatever, that they feel they're being discriminated against and they will call me. And we have a lot of stories around that. You and I have gone through them for more than a decade.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And I would say that in those cases, I will say to this to those employees. Number one, I have your back. I'm your CEO. I have a huge responsibility. You are working for us. We're going to take care of you. I know that you work 24/7 for Salesforce. I'm going to make sure we take care of you. And if you are unhappy right now or feel like you are threatened or in danger or that you're in a toxic environment, I'll do what I can politically for you. But in some cases, there's not a lot I can do, but I can move you. And I have moved more than 300 employees. So in those cases where those employees feel that they are in a situation that is no, no longer tenable for them.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  I will get them on an airplane and their family and get them into a safe environment. And that is the number one thing I can do for them.

• 31:58Kara Swisher?

  For them as an employer.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  On the second side, um, what I can do, well, let's stay with Salesforce for a second. You know, when we, we started Salesforce 25 years ago, you know this story. We put 1% of our equity profit in time into a 501(c)(3) charity foundation. It was very easy because we had no employees, shareholders or anybody. And today that foundation has given away more than a billion dollars. It runs more than 50,000 nonprofits for free on our service. And also we've done 10 million hours of volunteerism. These are approximate numbers, but it's scaled and it's been incredible.

• 32:36Kara Swisher?

  Right. So this is your acting by.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Public safety. Yeah. This is what we do at the company.

• 32:40Kara Swisher?

  Rather than speaking out against some of these comments.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Because you've been there and you saw this is real over 25 years.

• 32:47Kara Swisher?

  Is it impossible?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Wait, the second piece is me personally, I've also given away more than a billion dollars to the public hospitals, the public schools, the public parks, um, public safety, the environment. You know, I love the trillion trees, which I started with Trump, the oceans. I have an ocean lab at UCSB, um, two children's hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, and three hospitals in Hawaii, where, which I love very much. And that's what I do also. And so this is who I am. It's all out in the public. There's no mystery.

• 33:22Kara Swisher?

  But is it impossible for public company CEOs now to be, to you? Do you think you could have done your thing you did in Ohio today without real repercussions? In Indiana, excuse me, not Ohio.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not Ohio, it's Indiana. So let's talk about what happened. And there's so much confusion about that. And I think it's extremely important for this current time, but also for the LGBTQ community. So you, you might remember that what was happening was the governor at the time did sign.

• 33:53Kara Swisher?

  Mike Pence.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Against the LGBT community. And I know him very well and I called him and I said, Why did you do that? Because now I'm gonna have to disinvest and not be able to hire as many people and bring customers there. And he's like, let's talk about this. And we actually resolved it and negotiated something within a couple of days. But we did have to get involved, and we did have to work it out.

• 34:20Kara Swisher?

  Could you do that?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Two hundred companies joined us.

• 34:23Kara Swisher?

  Mark, I have admiration. I have admiration, but could you do that today? Would you be worried?

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Of course.

• 34:30Kara Swisher?

  Because you want to get government contracts. You want to continue to participate.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  We didn't lose any government contracts from that.

• 34:36Kara Swisher?

  You don't feel like there is a retribution for that?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  I have a great relationship in Indiana. We have Indianapolis.

• 34:42Kara Swisher?

  I don't mean Indiana. I mean, if you are too, if CEOs in general are too, you know, loud, that they will have, you know, be denied. California, California.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I think they should take my example and actually talk to people. I think that even the current governor in Indiana, Eric Holcomb, who I'm a huge fan of, I, you know, talk to him, and I don't agree with everything. I don't agree with you on everything, Kara.

• 35:06Kara Swisher?

  No, we don't agree on much, actually. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  But we have a good dialogue.

• 35:10Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  And we respect each other. And also, I'm not afraid to talk to you about things. And this idea that we're watching a Super Bowl and that there's two teams and we're not able to cheer for either side, this is the end. Like, we're all on the same team here. And this is the United States of America, and we should be fighting for America and our country and try to bring people together and have a great tech industry and a great economy and fight for our values.

• 35:38Kara Swisher?

  There are, there are some issues when, for example, with California, Trump has threatened to defund cities. He's threatened to keep away federal stuff. He's said it. He's said it explicitly. And that is not, we're on the same team. It's if you're not on our team, you're not on a team at all. And you're not getting, you know, a lot of transgender people are moving states worried about new laws. So it's not exactly we're on the same team. It's be on our team or else in, in some cases with some issues.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  I think we have to separate what is said during the campaign from what happens in an administration. And one of the things that I noticed in Trump won, I would call it. He has a huge Trump club in California and he's here all the time playing golf and, you know, even there's a lot of pictures of him and Gavin Newsom together in Trump one and they did a lot together and they worked on a lot of projects together. So I understand when you're running, there's a huge amount of confrontation. And then, once you get into administration and you're the president, you're the president of the whole country. So, you know, that's when all of a sudden, people tend to move a little bit more to the center and I hope that's what happens.

• 36:39Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, they tend. We'll see, because I mean, some of his appointments look crazy and some look very reasonable.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  That was true in Trump one also.

• 36:45Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, okay. So let me, let me finish up on the, on the, what's happening here with the federal government. So you are, one of the things that's going to happen is this, this Doge thing. A lot of it has to do with job cuts and you, you wrote a Time article, I'm surprised they published it, called "How the Rise of Digital Workers Will Lead to an Unlimited Age." I, I want to know your position on the Department of Government Efficiency and, and the idea of cutting all these workers. Because, you know, you're talking about AI agents that could make companies more profitable, government more efficient. You, you've talked of the post-labor economy, which is scary for people. So talk about this push for efficiency with people worried. So how do you square that?

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Well, this is a moment in time that we have to get real about what's really happening with technology. And that's why I wrote the article. Because I think, maybe it's the first article that was ever written about agentic or agents as we're calling them, or aging force in time. And probably in a lot of places. This is the first time mainstream media has written about agents and what could happen. I take that article very seriously. I think it's important that we do talk about what is going to potentially happen with digital labor and human labor and how they're going to work together and how there can be changes. I think at a lot of government agencies, there probably is a lot of inefficiency. In my own company, there is a lot of inefficiency for the last two years. I've been trying to work on that.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  That's one of the reasons why we actually just had a great quarter. You know, we not only had great revenues, but we had great margins and cash flow because we have to address where we have overlap, or we've overhired, or we've created too much bureaucracy.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  And your garden is not complete until you've taken everything out of it. And that is true in managing an organization as well. And I think that we have to do that more in government. I hope that there are practical things that we can do to make things happen. And I think in the case of where we want to maybe hire more people into the government, we're going to use recruiting agents. And where we're going to, for example, help maybe provide more citizen access or direct interaction with the government with citizens, agents can be a huge opportunity for the government.

• 38:59Kara Swisher?

  Address the worries.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  You can envision that yourself.

• 39:01Kara Swisher?

  Yes, absolutely. But what, address the worries of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon have talked about,

• 39:09Kara Swisher?

  you know, $2 trillion in cuts. This is.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I put that on the cover of Time Magazine. I think it's actually a good idea.

• 39:16Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  I, I think we must get back to a balanced budget. I've been saying this for three decades. So this is not new. This is not a political position. I believe that this should be a bipartisan position. I have been appalled that our most recent presidents have not been trying to get to balanced budgets. I have had direct conversations with presidents in both parties that this is a critical part of our future. We cannot be running these huge deficits. Everybody understands that.

• 39:44Kara Swisher?

  It's a question of deficit.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Numbers are just, you know, unreasonable what's happening with the amount of interest that we're paying. So if he can find a way to do that and we can rebalance our government, it's going to make for a much better economy overall.

• 39:57Kara Swisher?

  What in the short term happens to those people, though, in this shift? Whether it's gigantic or just let's cut, cut the fat out. If some of it's not fat, it just, we're not going to do that anymore.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Well, people will have to find new jobs. And right now unemployment is an incredibly low level. There, I can't even find people to hire myself. So, you know, this is an idea that every organization must be constantly rebalancing and looking at its efficiency. And the government is not one of those organizations. So they should adopt some of the best practices from America's best companies. That's one of the reasons we. Have great companies is because we do have practices and no one likes the word layoff. The first time we did a major layoff, which was two years ago at Salesforce. I I mean, people were so mad at me. Everyone's upset. It's terrible. I hated doing it myself. It was one of the darkest moments in my career that I even had to do it.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  But how else can I kind of got to where I am now where I'm hiring thousands of people? So it was a moment where I had to restructure to get to where I would get to. I could not get to where I am today without doing what I did then. I didn't like it. I didn't want to do it. It was horrible. I think we had conversations about it.

• 41:12Kara Swisher?

  Yes, we did.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  And you knew how upset I was. But now look at how happy I am that I'm here. And now I just told everyone yesterday, I'm going to hire, you know, hopefully another 2,000 salespeople. I'm growing. The company is growing. It's amazing.

• 41:25Kara Swisher?

  One of the people do say, one of the reasons tech is so thriving is there's no very regulations hitting you the way it is other. Other industries, and I think probably you'd agree with that. There's not as many guardrails. Talk about any regulations you think should happen. When Joe Rogan interviewed Marc Andreessen, you wrote that he unpacks the dangers of government overreach in crypto and AI. Do you think the government's overreaching or do you see tech regulation as important? I can't. I couldn't tell because there haven't been many regulations.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think in one area, you know that I feel that what is that called? Is it section 230?

• 42:02Kara Swisher?

  Yes, section 230. Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  You know, I've said.

• 42:04Kara Swisher?

  Social media.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  That should be restructured. So that is an area that should be looked at and evaluated and restructured is not appropriate based on where technology is today.

• 42:14Kara Swisher?

  You called Facebook, I recall, in a famous interview with me, you called Facebook a cigarette company, I think, as I recall.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  You may, I said that there are aspects of this technology, and I've been very clear about this, that can be addictive. They can go after our kids. Um, there, there needs to be oversight for our children. And I have a lot of admiration for what Australia did.

• 42:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  If you're under sixteen, you can't have a phone or social media or something.

• 42:41Kara Swisher?

  Not sure about phone.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  They've said this stuff is too dangerous and addictive for kids. I'm like, probably a smart idea. And I think that we should be like thinking that way. That we are dealing with explosive technologies. That this is very serious. A lot of this technology is amazing. It's magical. It's incredible. It's going to transform our lives. It is going to make us healthier. It is going to make our climate better. It is going to educate us. It is going to do all these incredible things. But wow, is it dangerous? And we need to be really careful with it.

• 43:14Kara Swisher?

  What AI regulation would you put in? What, what would you advocate for in AI, for example?

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Well, I think that in, I, I would be cautious in reg, over regulating AI right now. Cause it's very nascent and I don't see a lot of danger.

• 43:28Kara Swisher?

  That's what they said about section two thirty, didn't they, Mark? Remember? I was around for that.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Here's the difference, what I'm going to say. And I, and I think I just said it. And I think this is actually a good point. When they put in section two thirty, that was a moment in time. We can't just put something in and then never reevaluate it. You know, that was put in decades ago. It wasn't put in last year.

• 43:48Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Over that period, three or four decades, technology has changed. It has gotten dramatically lower cost, easier to use and far more powerful. And you can't just put something in like that and then not reevaluate it on a regular and consistent basis. If you're quote unquote, regulating the tech industry. And I think that that is where we are. But this stuff is moving fast. And that's why people like you are successful. Cause you're able to report on all the changes. And it's why people like me are successful. Cause I am able to build it and create it and sell it and market it. And it offers a lot of value to our customers. But you know, the government needs to adapt and evolve.

• 44:28Kara Swisher?

  Right now, no AI, but maybe change to two thirty.

• 44:33Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Well, I would say that there should be kind of oversight and, you know, funding and research and evaluation, but we should be cautious with overregulating.

• 44:44Kara Swisher?

  So, speaking of actually doing things, you're not gonna, there's a lot of people, Elon and Vivek are the new Doge masters, whatever that ends up meaning. Many other tech people are infiltrating the government. Joe Long, still your best friend, wants to be in it. Emile Michael, who is the number two executive at Uber. Obviously, Peter Thiel has his connections. Should there be this many tech dudes there? Do you think that's a good thing? Would you like to take a more active role?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  I've had my time in the government.

• 45:12Kara Swisher?

  So, no, you're not gonna join it. But who should?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I think everybody should have their chance. And, you know, that's when I was 40 years old. I'm, you know, 60 years old now. I don't, I don't know if this is exactly my moment to roll back into the government.

• 45:26Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

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• 47:02Kara Swisher?

  So I want to finish up. I have just a couple more questions. You bought Time Magazine for $120 million, $190 million in 2018. There was reports that you were in talks to sell to Greek international media company, Antenna Group. Is this true that you're in conversations to sell it?

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Well, Time is a small company and Time's amazing. I really enjoy Time. I love it. I love working on it. And look, Kara, if you're interested in buying it, we could have a conversation.

• 47:29Kara Swisher?

  But Art, have you talked?

• 47:31Speaker 00

  I don't have any deal on the table to sell Time.

• 47:33Kara Swisher?

  Have you been in talks to do so and why?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  There are always people who are approaching us to buy Time. It is so well regarded. The brand, here's a funny story. I will go all over the world because I have customers all over the world and I'll be meeting with these customers. I'll be meeting with media like yourself or others. And we'll be talking about things. I'll be like, and people that I don't know will say, hey, tell me, what do you do? And I say, I'm the CEO of Salesforce and I've, you know, we're the second largest software company in the world. We have 75,000 people, do $38 billion in revenue this year. And, you know, we're pioneering the Agentic platform. It's very exciting. And I also own Time Magazine. What? You own Time Magazine?

• 48:14Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  What? What does that mean?

• 48:17Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Tell me everything about what you're doing with Time Magazine.

• 48:20Kara Swisher?

  All right.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  And I'm like... Okay, well, this is a company of like 200 people and is, you know, has a physical magazine, a digital magazine. We do events. We have a Time Studios.

• 48:32Kara Swisher?

  But small business. Is there a way to make it anything but a small business in this day and age?

• 48:37Speaker 00

  It's a great business. I think that was funny. You know, we've been talking about the Trump administration. I just read literally on the way to the interview that Jared Isaacman, who

• 48:47Kara Swisher?

  It's gonna be NASA head, yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  I did a huge documentary on him called Inspiration Four, which is amazing on how he went to space and SpaceX and Elon. And it's on Netflix and it's, if you haven't seen that documentary on Netflix, it is awesome, right?

• 49:05Kara Swisher?

  Right, it's a time.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  And it's a great piece of journalism from Time.

• 49:08Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  And I would say like, things like that are super fun. We also did Genius on Kanye West. It's like a

• 49:14Kara Swisher?

  I think you're making fine things, but can it ever be a very good business?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's, it's fine, but Salesforce is a very good business.

• 49:24Kara Swisher?

  Right. So is it a vanity project? How do you look at it?

• 49:27Speaker 00

  It's fun and enjoyable and it's more of a hobby, honestly. Look, it's a small, it's a small business and it's fun. And it's enjoyable. That's why I'm, that's why I've been doing it. And I wouldn't say I'm especially good at it. You know, I would say that I'm not great media owner, visionary media person, you know, no one, people will say that I'm a visionary, like I've won a lot of awards for being visionary, pathetic in the tech industry. Mark is of great visionary, you've given me awards, you know, all kinds of things, a leadership awards, you've handed me all kinds of pieces of glass with my name on it, but I have gotten no awards.

• 50:03Kara Swisher?

  For visionary. We're gonna get to that. We have two final questions about that. So every week we get a question from an outside expert. Let's have a quick listen and this is what you were just discussing.

• 50:13Speaker 06

  Hello, Mark. Oliver Darcy from Status. A few years ago, there was hope that billionaires like yourself would rescue the media. But recently, that notion has been punctured. Jeff Bezos blocked the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris in the election, plunging the paper into turmoil. Patrick Soon Sheong at the LA Times, who seems to be rather mega curious, did the same thing. Meanwhile, you're reportedly looking to sell Time Magazine after making cuts this year. Was the public wrong to put so much faith in wealthy men like yourself saving the fourth estate?

• 50:44Kara Swisher?

  Thoughts?

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Number one is not wealthy men because I own it with my wife.

• 50:48Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Wealthy, you're right. That is something.

• 50:51Kara Swisher?

  I didn't say it. You know, I've texted you whenever you don't give women credit, but go ahead.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Thank you. The second piece is, is that media is hard. It's gone through a lot of transformation in the last 20 years. Technology has changed media and yeah, there are people in media like myself or Bezos who are working on these kind of established brands and media properties. It's not easy. It's, it's a lot of hard work, but in the case of Time, I think the reason that we've been successful, and I do think we are successful is we still have the magazine, which I love reading every week. And by the way, so does your good friend, Donald Trump. If you go to Mar-a-Lago, they have huge walls of just Time Magazine covers. It's amazing.

• 51:33Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's your demographic, Mar-a-Lago people, but go ahead, go ahead.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Number two, we have phenomenal digital journalism. You can go to time.com and we even make our paywall free because we think free people should read freely. We're very grateful to our sponsors who make that possible. And number three is we bring, have physical events because we love bringing communities of people together, like our Time 100. And you've been to some of those programs. They're awesome. And also we do Time Studios to bring heroic work, like the work of Jared Isaacman or other creative.

• 52:07Kara Swisher?

  Have you been good stewards as a group?

• 52:09Speaker 00

  I can't speak to Patrick and Jeff, like, you know, which was just brought out, but I can speak to what we've done, I think has been really somewhat hard and difficult work. Individuating it from this, from Meredith, which was hard, creating its own independent company, building new products and product lines. And getting to the point where it's actually now a profitable business. That was really hard creative work. We even went through all kinds of other product and creative, you know, iterations to get there and we're there, but wow, it's, it's a journey.

• 52:44Kara Swisher?

  It's not a great business. Whenever, whenever tech people say they're going to compete with me, I'm like, it's not a very good business.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Hey, did I mention Agent Force? This is really a great opportunity.

• 52:52Kara Swisher?

  Last, last two very quick questions. When we talked about this acquisition in 2018, you told me, and I want you to listen to this back and forth. Go ahead.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  It can be anything it wants to be.

• 53:03Kara Swisher?

  Your role, you're not, you're not answering my question.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  I'm inspiring visionary.

• 53:06Kara Swisher?

  What does that mean? What are you gonna walk around and say things?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  I, I, yeah, I'm gonna walk around and, and try to inspire a vision for the future of the

• 53:13Kara Swisher?

  What does that mean? I don't even understand what that means.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Well, that's why I am a visionary leader, Cara, and you're not.

• 53:19Kara Swisher?

  I actually make content, so I would like to know what, if you were the owner of something that I had, what your business was.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Well, here's how I look at it, which is I think we are going through a lot of change in our society today. And for a lot of people, they're not really sure how to make context of this change. And is it gonna really help them or is it gonna hurt them? And I think that having a trusted guide like Time Magazine and having that in the right hands and given, giving the leaders of that magazine, the support they need to do what they need to do. I think that's, that's the most critical thing.

• 53:50Kara Swisher?

  You're gonna give them more money.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, we're gonna invest. That's for sure, the last part.

• 53:55Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I know, it's a lot of your money. You still had to make layoffs too, which are difficult, as you said.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  We had to invest a lot to get it to the point where it is now.

• 54:02Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  So I think all those things were really true. I didn't realize actually I was as visionary as I am when I go back and look at the statement.

• 54:08Kara Swisher?

  If you do say so yourself.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Oh, you are a visionary in the media industry. But no, I think that that's very true, everything I said.

• 54:15Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, okay, all right. So you're still the visionary. You still claim visionary status.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Cara, you are also very much a visionary.

• 54:21Kara Swisher?

  I am, I know that for sure. So last question, you and I have someone that we totally agree on, Susan Wojcicki, who tragically died this year. She was also on.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  Now you're just gonna make me cry? That's the whole point of this interview?

• 54:32Kara Swisher?

  I'm gonna make you cry. I want you, someone who knows her. She was one of the good ones and they're, they're dwindling, let me just say. And Susan's death underscores that for me. So I'd love you to take a moment and reflect on her impact.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Well, I would just say that, you know, to what I can, I'm not prepared for this. I would say, this was a great woman. She is a great mother.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  She had incredible children. She was a great wife. She has incredible husband.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  She is a great daughter, her incredible mother, father, who I both know, the father is also passed away. A great sister, she has two amazing sisters who I know very well. Just a great person, in many ways, a great role model to me. A great leader in the tech industry, helped create Google.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  This comes after all of those things, you know, she also led YouTube through its incredible surge to be one of the dominant parts of our whole world. She also was very much values based. She has done so much for her family and her friends, including me, she also joined my board at Salesforce. When I was going through some difficult times and led me through difficult times, she was always there for me. And I miss her every single day, I have a huge photo of her in my main office, which I look at every day and I think about that our, all of our time is fleeting.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  That for all of us, life is precious, it's fleeting. We have the present moment, thank God, that we can be happy in and enjoy this moment. And also realize that, take our life very seriously, that, you know, when I think about what am I doing with myself, my family, my friends, my health, my happiness, my career, my spirituality, my love of God. All the things that are important to me, I take them all into my heart against the frame of Susan. You know, that I look at Susan as someone who, in her life and in her death, is a vision for me and an inspiration for my own life.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  And has guided me and I have made changes in my life based on her life.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Like, I really miss her. And also, I had another friend of mine that I lost this year, Sandy Robertson, who I miss also. Every single day, I think about these people, friends that I've lost. I made a list of them now in my phone. And I look at that list, and I think about who has left? And what is the message that they left us with? And I think, you know, this is where we have to get back and really think about how much love do we have in our hearts for ourself and others? Because when they leave, that's really all that is left.

• 57:45Kara Swisher?

  Indeed. Well said, Mark. Keep that in mind.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  Thank you, Kara.

• 57:49Kara Swisher?

  You've got to make these guys not be so jerky. Be kinder. You have to. I rely on you and Mark Cuban now. That's where I am, Mark.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  You're the best. I hope we have more conversations.

• 58:00Kara Swisher?

  All right, Mark, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  I love you, Kara Swisher. You're the best.

• 58:05Kara Swisher?

  Oh, thank you, Mark.

• 58:08Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Aaliyah Jackson, Rick Kwan, and Fernando Aruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are a visionary, just like me and Mark. If not, remember, time is fleeting, so I don't know what to say. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 58:52Speaker 02

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