Elon Musk avoided discussing the collapsed Twitter deal as he addressed an audience of Barons in Sun Valley on Saturday, two sources attending the conference told Reuters.
In an extended interview, Mr. Musk spent most of his time talking about colonizing Mars and extolling the virtues of increasing birth rates on Earth, the sources said. Musk, chief executive of Tesla Inc and rocket company Space X, has long advocated establishing a civilization on the red planet.
Mr Musk said earlier this week he will do his best to help what he called “the underpopulation crisis” following a media report that said he was having twins with a top executive at his brain-chip start-up Neuralink.
He spoke about declining birth rates in wealthy countries, a topic he has explored extensively on Twitter.
The billionaire entrepreneur took the stage at the Allen & Co Sun Valley Conference, an annual gathering of media and technology executives in Idaho, less than 24 hours after announcing that he had closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Inc.
The interview was conducted by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research firm founded by Musk and several others.
Musk’s arrival at the Allen & Co Sun Valley conference this week shocked the off-record event, where headline-making is usually done outside the prying eyes of the media.
“It just seems like an absolute mess,” said a senior media executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity prior to the interview. “The guy makes his own rules…I wouldn’t like to be on Twitter, where you have to take this guy seriously.”
Sun Valley is quintessentially an athleisure version of the Met Gala, with photographers capturing the arrivals of fleece-covered media moguls and reporters recording power lunches at the on-site Konditorei cafe.
A Hollywood power broker Friday expressed hope that the Musk interview would enliven the sedate, cerebral atmosphere of the conference this year.
Hours later, Mr. Musk’s lawyers delivered an eight-page letter to Twitter stating that he intended to call off the deal to take over the social network.
The document, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleged that in the past two months, Twitter has failed to respond to repeated requests for information, or obtain its consent before taking actions that would affect its business, such as firing two key executives.
Up until that point, talks in media circles had focused on Wall Street’s reappraisal of streaming business in the wake of Netflix Inc.’s subscriber losses.
A director of digital media said Hollywood, which is typically isolated from recessions, is suddenly concerned about how a deteriorating economy will affect their billion-dollar investment in streaming services.
“For the first time, people are aware that the economy is impacting the entertainment industry as inflation impacts customer churn,” the digital media director said, referring to subscribers leaving a service. “People are saying, ‘Wow, will people really pay for three of these things?'”
After Mr Musk’s announcement, a top executive noticed the elephant in the room. Saturday’s comments may prove uncomfortable for two conference attendees: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal.
One of Musk’s last public messages to Agrawal came in the form of a poo emoji tweet in response to the Twitter CEO’s defense of how the company accounts for spambots.
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