The Key CEO Traits Investors Are Missing | Kara Swisher

**Kara Swisher** (0:00)
If I see too much performativeness, it's a clocker for me. I'm like, oh, a big new headquarters, a lot of interviews, a glow up, a personal glow up, a showing off. That is one thing I always am like, interesting.
At some point, people lose their mojo, right? Lots of people do, or they run out of ideas. As I said, they get bored with the business that brought them there.
And very few people trying to think, Warren Buffett stuck to his knitting, right, and did rather well doing that. They don't want to sit and perfect the thing they've done because it's not as exciting to be head of Facebook as it is to be head of an AI company, I guess. You know, this happened before in the early Internet age. If you remember, Cisco was the darling of everything, and then it wasn't, right? Because they were essentially the NVIDIA of that era. You know, you sort of want to make those comparison. Is OpenAI Netflix, or is it Google, or is Anthropic Google? And so one of these is going to get out and be enormous, and all of them aren't, and I think that's the question.

**Wilfred Frost** (1:03)
Welcome to The Master Investor Podcast with me, Wilfred Frost, where we celebrate and learn from the success of the greatest investors, business leaders and politicians in the world, giving you, our listeners, the edge. The Master Investor Podcast is sponsored by LSEG, Interactive Brokers, The World Gold Council, and BNY Investments. Please do remember, the views expressed in this podcast are for general information purposes only. Nothing in the podcast constitutes a financial promotion, investment advice or a personal recommendation. More on that in the show notes.
My guest today is Kara Swisher, the leading tech journalist of our times, the co-founder and editor-at-large of Recode.
They worked on many storied journalistic institutions, from the New York Magazine to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN and MSNBC, and the host of multiple award-winning podcasts from On with Kara Swisher to Pivot with Scott Galloway. And of course, those are both part of Vox Media, which has just recently been purchased in large part because of the success of her podcast. Kara, welcome to The Master Investor Podcast.

**Kara Swisher** (2:14)
Thank you. Thank you for having me on. That's a lot of things that I am.

**Wilfred Frost** (2:18)
I know it's a lot and I actually want to get to how you balance all of those things at some point.

**Kara Swisher** (2:24)
I will answer, but who's the guy on the behind you right there? Who's the British guy?

**Wilfred Frost** (2:29)
Yeah, that's my late father. He's also David Frost, who had, I'd say even more media parts to his buy than you do.

**Kara Swisher** (2:38)
Oh, well, it's a wonderful picture. I just love it. I keep staring at it anyway.

**Wilfred Frost** (2:42)
Yeah, he looms over me.
I'm obviously biased. I think he is the greatest interviewer of all time. So he's that constant thought as I'm doing my own interviews.

**Kara Swisher** (2:54)
Yeah. Well, fantastic.
Okay. Now I'm done.

**Wilfred Frost** (2:58)
Let's start. No, I appreciate that. Let's dive in though to the here and now before we broaden out. And I guess my first question on the current tech environment to you is whether or not two of the key IPOs that we've been waiting for, Anthropic and OpenAI, do now get away in the way that a few months ago before the SpaceX IPO, even possibly immediately after the SpaceX IPO, everyone was hoping would happen.

**Kara Swisher** (3:27)
Well, I think most people think OpenAI will not go public, and it's largely due to the numbers, which aren't great. I think that's one of the things. And especially in light of what's been happening with SpaceX, which has been going, I know a lot of analysts have a $300 number on that thing, but it's a real bargain then because it's $149. It might have gone down more today. I don't know. The stock market just opened here. I think people were worried already about the finances around all these frontier models essentially. And a lot of economists, I know there was a gathering in Italy that started to talk about the possibility of a bubble here, whether companies are getting a lot of ROI from a lot of this stuff, and where it's going from here, and the enormous costs. And on top of that, you have the open source movement, especially Chinese open source models that are much cheaper for companies. And so there's alarms everywhere, there's alarm bells everywhere.
And so most people feel as if Anthropic might go public this year, because they have better results and better numbers and a better story, and that OpenAI is going to have to delay itself until 2027 That's right now the current feeling.