Tag: Andrew Ross Sorkin

Elon Musk Would Really Like People to Know He’s Never Been to Therapy
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Elon Musk tweeted late Wednesday night that he’s never gone to therapy, a fact that he wants to be immortalized on his gravestone. And whatever you think of the billionaire’s attitude to mental health treatment, Musk’s tweet would seem pretty unremarkable in isolation. However, Musk keeps tweeting about this for some reason, including three times in the past two months alone.

Did Elon Musk Regret Buying Twitter? | Walter Isaacson Interview
- “Put ‘Never Went to Therapy’ on my gravestone,” Musk tweeted on February 28.
- “He’s dead right. Please put ‘Never went to therapy’ on my gravestone,” Musk tweeted on January 29 in response to a video of film director Wernher Herzog.
- “Please put ‘Never Went to Therapy’ and ‘Invented Car Fart’ on my gravestone. Those are my only requests,” Musk tweeted on January 8, adding an extra element for his hypothetical tombstone.
But those are just the most recent times Musk has tweeted about therapy. Another instance of Musk using the same language happened in July 2023, when the Tesla CEO was responding to a far-right influencer on X who suggested white liberals have more mental illness than the general population.

“Why is mental illness so prominent amongst Liberal Whites?” the account, which goes by the name The Rabbit Hole, tweeted.

“’Never went to therapy’ Please put that on my gravestone,” Musk responded.

Obviously the choice to go to therapy is a personal one and Musk is free to decide if he’d find that kind of thing helpful. But if he’s truly “never” gone to therapy it does seem a little odd that he’d think he can make an effective judgement about whether it would work for him. After all, the billionaire microdoses ketamine for depression, according to a Wall Street Journal report from last year. Typically, any drug interventions for mental health issues require treatment from a professional.

Musk has made repeated suggestions that he’s often struggled with mental health issues, including on the Lex Fridman podcast when he referred to his mind as a “storm” last year.

“My mind is a storm. I don’t think most people would want to be me. They may think they’d want to be me but they don’t know, they don’t understand,” Musk told Fridman.

Musk was asked about that comment—that his mind is a storm—in an interview with the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin on November 30, 2023 at the DealBook Summit in New York. Sorkin tried to probe deeper into the issues that may be troubling Musk and after an achingly long 12-second silence in front of a live audience, Musk said completely unprompted that it felt like he was in a therapist’s office.

“I wish we were like on a psychiatrist couch or something. You know, I think to some degree I was born this way, but, and then it was amplified by a difficult childhood frankly. But I can remember even in happy moments when I was a kid that there’s just, it just feels like there’s just a… a rage of forces in my mind constantly,” Musk explained.

Musk said that sometimes this disturbance in his mind would make him productive. But after listing successes, Musk seemed to get troubled and introspective again.

“So these demons of the mind, you know, are for the most part, harnessed to productive ends. But that doesn’t mean that once in a while they don’t, you know… go wrong,” Musk said.

Musk also brought up the topic of suicidal ideation at a young age.

“I mean, I did have this existential crisis when I was around twelve about what’s the meaning of life? Isn’t it all pointless? Why not just commit suicide? Why exist?” Musk recalled.

That interview is probably best remembered for Musk’s defiant attitude in the face of advertiser backlash over comments that were widely seen as anti-Semitic. But these comments are worth revisiting as the billionaire keeps repeating that he doesn’t need therapy.

Again, Musk can hold whatever opinions he likes about the mental health profession and is free to choose whatever path he wants to make in life. He is, after all, the wealthiest man in the world who is doing just fine in a material sense. But given the frequency Musk tweets about how he’s never been to therapy, it’s clearly a topic that’s on his mind, and some people do find it useful to just have someone to talk with.

More than 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2023, slightly higher than the 49,449 suicide deaths in 2022 and 48,183 suicide deaths in 2021, according to the CDC. And while therapy isn’t magic, it can help people who find themselves in desperate circumstances.

If you or someone you know is having a crisis or contemplating suicide, please call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.
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Matt Novak

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February 28, 2024
Jamie Dimon warns 'all these very powerful forces' will impact U.S. economy in 2024 and 2025

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JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he remains cautious on the U.S. economy over the next two years because of a combination of financial and geopolitical risks.

“You have all these very powerful forces that are going to be affecting us in ’24 and ’25,” Dimon told Andrew Ross Sorkin on Wednesday in a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Ukraine, the terrorist activity in Israel [and] the Red Sea, quantitative tightening, which I still question if we understand exactly how that works,” Dimon said. Quantitative tightening refers to moves by the Federal Reserve to reduce its balance sheet and rein in previous efforts including bond-purchasing programs.

Dimon has advocated caution over the past few years, despite record profits at JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, and a U.S. economy that has defied expectations. Despite the corrosive impact of inflation, the American consumer has mostly remained healthy because of good employment levels and pandemic-era savings.

In Dimon’s view, the relatively buoyant stock market of recent months has lulled investors on the potential risks ahead. The S&P 500 market index rose 19% in the past year and isn’t far from peak levels.

“I think it’s a mistake to assume that everything’s hunky-dory,” Dimon said. “When stock markets are up, it’s kind of like this little drug we all feel like it’s just great. But remember, we’ve had so much fiscal monetary stimulation, so I’m a little more on the cautious side.”

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said Wednesday that while the market environment excluding geopolitical issues “feels better today” than a year ago, he was troubled by soaring U.S. debt levels.

“I’m very concerned about the growing debt,” Solomon said. “It’s a big risk issue that we’re going to have to deal with and reckon with, it just might not happen in the next six months.”

Dimon is no stranger to dire predictions: In 2022, he warned investors of an economic “hurricane” ahead because of quantitative tightening and the Ukraine conflict.

In Wednesday’s wide-ranging interview, Dimon discussed his views on Ukraine, former President Donald Trump, immigration, commercial real estate and bitcoin.

“We have to teach the American public that this is about freedom and democracy for the free world, and that’s why the battle is being fought,” Dimon said about the Ukraine conflict.

Read more: Jamie Dimon says ‘brace yourself’ for an economic hurricane caused by the Fed and Ukraine war

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January 17, 2024
Ex-FTX CEO says he didn’t ‘knowingly’ misuse clients’ funds

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NEW YORK — The former CEO of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX said Wednesday that he did not “knowingly” misuse customers’ funds, and said he believes his millions of angry customers will eventually be made whole.

The comments from Sam Bankman-Fried came during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at a conference put on by The New York Times. Bankman-Fried has done a handful of media interviews since FTX collapsed in mid-November, but Wednesday’s was his first video interview since it filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11.

“I didn’t ever want to commit fraud on anyone. I was shocked at what happened this month,” Bankman-Fried said.

FTX failed in the cryptocurrency version of a bank run, when customers tried to withdraw their assets all at once because of growing doubts about the financial strength of the company and its affiliated trading arm, Alameda Research. Since its collapse, FTX’s new management has called the cryptocurrency exchange’s management a “complete failure of corporate controls.”

Bankman-Fried said that he took responsibility for FTX’s collapse and said he failed to grasp the amount of risk FTX and Alameda were taking on across both businesses. One of the accusations made against Bankman-Fried is that he arranged for Alameda to use customers’ assets in FTX to place bets in the market. Bankman-Fried told Sorkin he did not “knowingly” co-mingle customers’ assets with Alameda.

Exchanges like FTX are supposed to segregate customers’ deposits from any bets they place in the markets. Other financial companies have gotten into legal hot water for misusing customers deposits, one example being MF Global roughly 10 years ago.

“Whatever happened, why it happened, I had a duty to our stakeholders, our customers, our investors, the regulators of the world, to do right by them,” Bankman Fried said.

Sorkin pushed Bankman-Fried on how and when investors will get their money back, to which Bankman-Fried said he largely believed the U.S. affiliate of FTX was entirely solvent and could start processing withdrawals at once. As for the rest of FTX, which was significantly larger than the U.S. division, he said the fate of customers’ funds were largely out of his control at this point.

Bankman-Fried, who was once one of the richest people in the world on paper, now says he likely has less than $100,000 to his name after FTX’s failure. He’s getting by on one credit card while still in the Bahamas.

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November 30, 2022
‘I’ve had a bad month’ and ‘didn’t ever try to commit fraud,’ former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried says: Live updates

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Striking a contrite tone, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said he “didn’t do a good job” at upholding his responsibilities to regulators, customers, and investors in a hotly anticipated conversation with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit.

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” Bankman-Fried said. “I saw it as a thriving business and I was shocked by what happened this month.”

“I’ve had a bad month,” Bankman-Fried added later.

Bankman-Fried appeared by video feed from the Bahamas, Sorkin said. “I’ve been in the Bahamas for the last year,” Bankman-Fried said when asked about why he remained in the island nation.

Sorkin asked Bankman-Fried what motivated his acquisitions in the crypto industry, given the size of Alameda’s borrowing from companies Bankman-Fried intended to acquire.

Bankman-Fried claimed that he believed that by the middle of 2022, Alameda had repaid all lines of credit to various borrowing desks. But Alameda still owes BlockFi over $670 million, according to court filings.

“What are your lawyers telling you right now? Are they suggesting it’s a good idea for you to be speaking?” Sorkin asked the former billionaire.

“No, they’re very much not.”

“The time that I really knew there was a problem was November 6,” Bankman-Fried said, after Alameda’s sizable FTT position was exposed by Coindesk. “When we looked at that, there was a potential serious problem.”

“Alameda had taken a huge hit” by that point. “We were seeing a run on the bank start,” Bankman-Fried said.

“I was nervous [when] the Alameda balance sheet” was exposed by Coindesk, Bankman-Fried said, but expected the damage was going to be limited to Alameda, not an “existential” crisis for FTX.

Sorkin asked Bankman-Fried why FTX and Bankman-Fried even had access to customer money.

“I wasn’t running Alameda, I didn’t know exactly what was going on, I didn’t know the size of their position,” Bankman-Fried said. “A lot of these are things I’ve learned over the last month [in the days leading up to bankruptcy.]”

New leadership at FTX said that Bankman-Fried exercised significant control over the entire empire.

Sorkin pressed Bankman-Fried on Alameda’s gambling on questionable cryptocurrencies, reading a letter out from an investor who lost his life savings of $2 million.

“The U.S. platform is fully solvent and funded,” Bankman-Fried said. “I believe withdrawals could be opened up today and be made whole.”

Bankman-Fried defended the fact that he was unaware of the Alameda exposure. In 2019, he said, 40% of FTX’s volume was from Alameda. By 2022, Bankman-Fried claimed, that number was down to 2%, which led him to believe that FTX’s exposure was lessened.

Sorkin continued to press Bankman-Fried on the lending of customer assets. Bankman-Fried demurred.

“In 2018, FTX didn’t have bank accounts,” Bankman-Fried said as justification for why users were asked to wire funds to an account in Alameda’s name instead of directly to FTX.

Rumors had flown since FTX’s Nov. 11 implosion about whether Bankman-Fried would appear at the event. In a tweet last week, the former FTX CEO confirmed he’d sit down to talk with Sorkin.

Bankman-Fried’s FTX imploded in mid-November after Coindesk reported irregularities in FTX balance sheets. Since FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware on Nov. 11, Bankman-Fried has engaged with the media sporadically. “F*** regulators,” he told a Vox reporter in a Twitter message.

“I f***** up,” he wrote in another Tweet.

Semafor disclosed messages between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Bankman-Fried, in which Musk invited the former crypto billionaire to roll over his $100 million stake in Twitter.

FTX was once hailed as the poster child of responsible crypto. Regulators and lawmakers looked to Bankman-Fried as the future of crypto regulation, a reputation that Bankman-Fried cultivated through appearances before Congress and deepened through generous political contributions.

Bankman-Fried was already known as one of the largest donors to Democratic candidates. He claimed in a recent interview that he gave equally generously to Republican causes, through so-called “dark pool” contributions.

Reporters, Bankman-Fried said, “freak the f*** out if you donate to Republicans.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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November 30, 2022