Kate Conger
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I think one of the things that was surprising to me, and maybe it shouldn't have been, but one of the things that was surprising to me was how comfortable Elon was with making decisions that were just divorced from financial reality.
You know, and I think
Yeah.
that is going to make us money.
And I expected that almost more so from someone like Elon, who is the richest man in the world.
It's like, OK, we're going to see decisions driving towards the bottom line.
And you could even argue that some of the layoffs were about that, that he wanted the company to be more profitable and was going to cut people in order to accomplish it.
But I think it was really surprising to see him just kind of fling any and all content moderation out the window and not worry about the fact that it was going to damage revenue, right?
And, you know, to see him now kind of laughing off things that Grok does, like it's anti-Semitic rants, like it's nudification of children and stuff.
You know, he's cracked jokes about that stuff.
And it obviously, obviously impacts the company's profitability.
And he just doesn't care.
I guess he's rich enough that he doesn't have to.
But I think that was really surprising to me to see that he really does not mind losing money.
You know, I think that it's an interesting moment or an opportunity for us to really think about the way we build and participate in these online spaces and trying to be
A little bit savvier about where we spend our time.
And I think that for people of Ryan and I's age who sort of came of age with social media, it was just sort of a default of like, oh, of course we're going to be on social media.
We have to be on social media.
There's a huge idealism about it.
And, yeah, you know, we kind of, I think, took for granted that this would be like a democratizing thing for speech.