Transcript of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Interview: Piers Morgan Uncensored  

On one end, I worry about an AI bubble, meaning overspending on AI, and ultimately it just doesn’t catch up the way — like the dot-com bubble of 2000.

PIERS MORGAN: Exactly.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: But then think about the other side. In success. What does success with AI actually look like? Well, to justify these prices of these companies, you have to create an extraordinary amount of productivity. Productivity means you have to grow at less cost. What is the cost?

PIERS MORGAN: You get rid of the humans.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: We are the cost. Now, if we are the cost, who’s going to have the money to pay for these things? So to me, there’s a very tiny sliver. We have to land the plane to make this work out properly.

PIERS MORGAN: And we are reliant on AI not learning how to self-design, which is the key warning that Professor Stephen Hawking gave to me shortly before he died, which is if that happens, that’s the end of our world, because if it can think for itself, it doesn’t need us anymore.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I think we’re still some ways from that. Sergey Brin, who founded Google, recently came out and said he thinks there needs to be another sort of major transformational invention, if you will, to get to the full—

PIERS MORGAN: But I saw Anthropic saying, I think only yesterday, warning, we’ve got to slow down here because the rate of change is so quick that it can be like the genie getting out of the bottle. It’s trying to get out, and it may be that we just make a mistake and boom, it’s gone.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I don’t know. I’ve talked to a lot of people in the industry to try and understand when we could get to a point where it’s truly dangerous. I don’t think we’re there now. I don’t even think we’d be there in 2 or 3 years from now. The question is, what does AI do on its own that genuinely injures us? And that may be once we get to robots, you know? Elon with humanoid robots. If you think about them building factories on their own and then deciding to build a new factory.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I’m more worried about Neuralink because I’m thinking if he can do that with people—

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Oh, and then control your brain.

PIERS MORGAN: Right, so at the moment it’s all for the good intention of people who’ve lost the ability to function properly, having this addition to their brain which helps them function properly again. But if you start to roll that out, logically, if you can start to mess with the human brain in a way that makes us, I guess, robotic, well, we’re becoming effectively robots, aren’t we?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Well, I think one of the things that I fear — I don’t know how much time you spend with my new friend Claude, or ChatGPT. Even before we get to that, just the loss of agency over your — I mean, how often I find myself asking it questions. And then if I don’t think about it long enough, sometimes I’ll realize that the answer is not right. But think about if you’re a younger person, you don’t have the experience. You’ve lost agency.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I see people ask it questions about me. Whether it’s Grok or whatever, particularly Grok. So I use X a lot and most of the time Grok is pretty accurate, but sometimes it’s completely wrong. And people are taking this as a kind of biblical script. Like the draft of the Constitution, but it’s not. It’s flawed at the moment.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Deeply flawed, I would say. And sometimes I’ll say, “Hey, I don’t think you have this right.” And then it will say, “Oh, I apologize, I did make a mistake.” But unless you know where to push back, that’s going to be a much broader societal problem, I imagine, over the next couple of years.

Is Elon Musk a Force for Good?

PIERS MORGAN: Is Elon Musk a force for good or not?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: In totality, I think ultimately he is a demonstrable force for good.

PIERS MORGAN: He’s a genius.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I mean, he’s a genius. I think what he’s done with automobiles is extraordinary. What he’s done with SpaceX is extraordinary. What he’s doing with AI. I admire so much about what he has created. Can I critique certain things that he’s said or done along the way? Absolutely. But I think if I look at the totality of this man, I mean, I think 100, 200 years from now, he’s the person we’ll be writing the history books about.

PIERS MORGAN: Right. You’ve interviewed him, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos. If you had to put all your life savings — which is not inconsiderable, Andrew, congratulations — who are you going with to invest in just one of them?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I don’t know about that.

PIERS MORGAN: All your books and movies and television work.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Oh, who am I going with?

The Greatest Businessman of All Time?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So here’s the complicated part. The question is, “risk-adjusted.” Elon Musk has been the winner of this game by a mile. And he keeps finding new ways to make money when people think it’s impossible. When the original investors in Tesla, people thought it was insane what he was doing.

PIERS MORGAN: Is he the greatest businessman of all time?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I think it’s hard to come up with another one. Only because he keeps finding these new opportunities. Think about what he’s just done, by the way, with SpaceX. He builds these data centers in the middle. Nobody’s focused on the data centers. And now he’s selling access to Google and to Anthropic. He’s coming up with new — I mean, even when things are not working for him, X, by the way, originally wasn’t working for him as an economic animal, if you will. He then merges it with his AI company, and all of a sudden the data stream now has value, and he makes that work for the investors. I kind of think I’d probably give him the money.

PIERS MORGAN: My only issue with X, for example, there’s no doubt that he’s leveled the playing field politically, I think, in a much fairer way. There’s also no doubt if you talk to any public figure that’s been using it regularly, the amount of abuse you get — exponentially higher. It’s become a real Wild West. I mean, I had one troll calling me a satanic pedophile. Obviously, for the record, I’m neither of those things, but I actually formally complained to X just to see what would happen. And they rejected the complaint. It didn’t cross any of their boundaries for any kind of action to be taken. That was like, well, if that’s happening to me —

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: It happens to everyone.

PIERS MORGAN: It happens to all of us. But that isn’t right, is it?

The Debt Crisis and America’s Economic Future

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: That is not right. That is not right. But then the question— then we get back to the First Amendment question, free speech question. Yes. About what we want to allow, what we don’t want to allow. Do we want to set up systems so that certain things can’t be said? I don’t know what the right— I have— what is the answer? I have gone from one end of the pendulum to the other, and I don’t have a good one for you.

Billionaires, Inequality, and the Tax System

PIERS MORGAN: Lewis Hamilton, the Formula One star, Sir Lewis as he now is, made news this week by saying billionaires shouldn’t exist. This is despite the fact he’s nearly won himself and his girlfriend Kim Kardashian is one. But you can believe something whilst also being that person. Do you think— does he have a point? I mean, there’s a lot of very, very rich people who dominate the 1% of the world, and that gap between them as a collective force and those with absolutely nothing has never been bigger. Can a society survive with that disparity?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Well, so what I worry about is the political polarization that happens as a result of inequality, more than anything else. Do I think billionaires should exist? I’m not here to tell you that billionaires shouldn’t exist. I think the question is, if we have this kind of inequality, how do we pay for the services that people, the ordinary person, ultimately needs? Who’s paying it? What’s the tax structure look like? And those are some bigger issues.

And this goes to the tax question, which is if you believe that the tax system is a manifestation of democracy, is it a fair system? Do people look and say, “It’s fair how people are being taxed”? And I would say right now, people look and think it’s not fair. And worse, the people with money are able to lobby— some people would call it bribing the system— to keep either policies in place or to change policies to make it more attractive for them and less attractive for everybody else. That’s the piece of it that I ultimately think needs to get solved before I would say we need to get rid of billionaires as a class.

America’s $40 Trillion Debt

PIERS MORGAN: The current debt in America is how much?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: We are on our way towards $40 trillion with a T by the end of this year.

PIERS MORGAN: I mean, the average person hears that and goes, how does this make any sense? How can America, the great superpower of the world, be that in debt and still be functioning, let alone having what appears to be a still pretty thriving economy.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: This is the thing singularly that I worry about more than anything else. People worry about AI, they worry about bubbles. I worry about the sovereign debt of the United States. And if there’s going to be a moment, if we do have, by the way, a bubble that bursts in the United States, the playbook we’ve learned from 2008, from the pandemic, is what do we do? We write a check. Write a check to everybody, bail everybody out.

PIERS MORGAN: Buy yourself out, adding to the debt.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Adding to the debt. And so what I worry about is the next time we write that check, and it could be trillions of dollars, whatever that check is, that whatever invisible line you think exists in the bond market, that the investors say, “No, we’re not doing this anymore like this. We cannot do it like this.” But what happens then? Well, what happens is the bond investors say, “We’re only going to buy your bonds if there’s double or triple the interest you’re going to pay me for the risk that I’m taking on.”

Well, if that happens, all of a sudden, it completely re-scrambles the budget of the United States. Meaning what the government services are offered. And that’s what can lead to, I think, real both civil unrest potentially, but a devolution both in services and the economic implications.

Capitalism, Greed, and the Need for Guardrails

PIERS MORGAN: You say in the book, you quote President Hoover. Yeah. Who in response to the ’29 crash said, “The only problem with capitalism is capitalists. They’re just too damn greedy.” That hasn’t changed.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: That part hasn’t changed. Look, capitalism is the best program that I’ve found over the years as it relates to socialism. But you do need some guardrails. Ultimately, you need guardrails to make a free market actually free. Because what ends up happening is it’s not free. It becomes about crony capitalism. It becomes about all of these weird incentives that screw up the system. And that, I think, is ultimately the thing we’ve got to watch for.

Trump’s Tariff War: Strategy or Mistake?

PIERS MORGAN: Let’s talk about Donald Trump before the war in Iran and now. Because there’s a reason why I’m going to separate the two things. Obviously, a year ago, he launched the tariff war. Many people predicted total financial Armageddon. It would be a total disaster. Well, that didn’t happen. It wasn’t a disaster. Right. But was it, by any qualitative assessment, a success? What is the reality of where we are with tariffs?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So there’s two elements to it. Because by the way, I was in the category of this could be a real problem. I was in that category though, and I think most people who were really sort of worried at the moment were in that category on what was called Liberation Day. When he first came out with the tariff program— People freaked. People freaked, but they freaked because the levels of the tariffs were extraordinarily higher than they ultimately were. Right. So part of it was that the plan changed.

PIERS MORGAN: Is tariff war a good strategy if you are the biggest beast in the room?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I genuinely believe tariff war is not good for consumers in America, and I believe it’s not good for the world. Why? Because ultimately it’s a tax that at least is partly borne by the consumer back in the United States. And not just that, I think there’s a broader question, which is to the degree that you are a nation that wants to have relationships with others that are long-term and loyal. We talk about here we are in the UK, the special relationship between the US and the UK. There was no problem between the U.S. and the U.K. prior to this. Do you believe that tariffs were warranted on the U.K.?

PIERS MORGAN: I didn’t, no. The trouble is, I could see some of it. He’s always had a thing about China, for example, ripping America off. He’s always believed in the power of tariffs. None of it was a surprise to me.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: By the way, I think you can use tariffs, and the president, by the way, has authority to use tariffs, and they can be used properly. If there is a country that demonstrably is doing something like China is and was, you can use tariffs against them. We have laws that allow for that. The idea of across-the-board tariffs just as a toll, that creates its own problems.

The Economy Before the Iran War

PIERS MORGAN: What was the state of the economy right before the war in Iran started, particularly in the US? What was the reality?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I think the reality was that things were getting better, on the whole.

PIERS MORGAN: Still the best economy in the world.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I think, look, that’s the funny part about this is the U.S., despite all the hand-wringing, I think is the best economy in the world. I think it was the best economy in the world during the beginning of the Trump term. I think it was the best economy in the world, by the way, even at the end of the Biden term. So I say that hopefully just empirically on the data.

As we moved into the war, I think there were some underlying questions underneath the economy, what was going on. By the way, this AI boom, I point in the book, but the AI boom has inflated everything.

PIERS MORGAN: To an unhealthy degree?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Well, to a concentrated degree. When people would say concentration’s unhealthy, if you take out the success of AI and remove it from GDP, you basically have a flat GDP. And then that raises the question about how healthy this really is.

The Iran War and Its Economic Impact

PIERS MORGAN: This Iran war, I’ve felt from day one, was a strategic mistake that Trump got talked into. He doesn’t— he won’t accept that, but I think he did. And the longer it goes on, clearly, the more economic damage is being done, not just to, obviously, the Iranians, but also to everybody, right? Because of the power of the Strait of Hormuz, which most people probably weren’t even aware of before this happened. The longer it goes on, what is the real damage to the economy, do you think?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Look, I’ve been surprised at how resilient—

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, because the markets don’t seem to have even noticed it.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: It is head-scratching to me every day.

PIERS MORGAN: How is that possible?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Investors in the stock market are professional optimists. And by the way, you have to be.

PIERS MORGAN: Or are they just— I mean, I say this respectfully because I know you have to. But are they not just a bunch of lemmings? I mean, look at the oil price graph, right, since the start of the war. Every time Trump breaks wind one way or another, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. No actual longer-term thinking, no assessment of what he’s saying, whether it bears any relation to the reality on the ground or anything. They just burp up and down. And I’m like, that’s not a sensible way of reacting to this news?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So here’s the complication. There’s two things going on. One is the stock market is supposed to be looking out 12 to 18 months from now. That is supposed to be the bet. So the bet that’s taking place today is that in 12 months or 18 months from now, call it, that there is no war, that the strait is open. That is what they’re gambling on. Is that a good gamble? I don’t know. I hope so.

The other thing I’d just say having studied 1929 and 2008, it has actually paid to be a professional optimist. I’m a professional skeptic. I’m a journalist. That’s— both of us are.

PIERS MORGAN: We’re in the skeptical business. Our first instinct is, “Who’s lying to me and why?” Right.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Exactly. So there is a little bit of a disconnect there. But if you look over the last 100 years, even with the 1929 crash, even with the 2008 or a dot-com or, you know, go down the list, you have been better off being invested in the market than not being in the market.

And in fact, there’s been a number of studies that have shown if you look at wars, any time a war has broken out in the past, by the way, you used to see big movements in the stock market. I think people started clocking what was happening. Oftentimes, if you put money into the market when a war broke out, a year later you were doing better. This is not investment advice. It’s just— historically, I think that’s what this investor class today is looking at.

The Best Way to Get Rich

PIERS MORGAN: In terms of getting rich, people look at someone like you and they go, well, come on, you know, you’re like an expert in this stuff. What is the best, safest way to get rich?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: It’s the way that Warren Buffett has told people to get rich, which is to buy an index fund. Early on in your life to compound your money. It is not sexy. It is not fast. But if you have some patience and you are consistent about it, you can get— You can get rich.

PIERS MORGAN: Warren, I interviewed him at CNN, and he was certainly, I would say, the most impressive business person I’ve ever met. I thought his worldview about it all, even down to— he’d sent one email ever, which ended up in a lawsuit. So he never emailed anybody again. He just uses a normal phone. He had a Nokia flip phone, which he just took calls on.

And it was a massive book called Snowball, wasn’t it, about him? Incredibly dense, but brilliant, I thought. By Alice Schroeder. Right. And incredibly well done. But basically, the sort of philosophy was to invest in great, well-run companies that generate lots of cash and on, but also following the habits of human beings. So when times were tough, people tended to stay at home, they’d order in pizza, they’d eat more, they’d chew more gum because they’re worried, they’d eat more confectionery and so on. And he would buy accordingly. And similarly, when times were great, he’d be into airlines and restaurants because that’s what people are doing. In other words, he’s chasing behavioral patterns and habits. I thought that was just incredibly simple, but fascinating.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: He has the strongest sort of emotional core. Yes. Most people, when the stock market falls, freak out. He says to himself, “Oh my goodness, everything’s on sale.”

PIERS MORGAN: Well, he said, “When others are fearful, be greedy. When others are greedy, be fearful.”

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: It’s very hard, I think, for most people to be able to follow that path. I think it’s the right path, but emotionally, it’s—

AI, Jobs, and the Road to 2029

PIERS MORGAN: You’ve got to have balls of steel.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: It’s not a natural act for most.

PIERS MORGAN: Your book is called 1929. We’re heading towards 2029, so 100 years later. What is it going to look like, the world, if you were a betting man? And things are looking pretty unpredictable right now, but your job is to try and predict these things. What are we going to look like, in particular, that relationship between AI and jobs? Because it seems to me to be the crucial fulcrum. That’s forgetting about war and whatever stuff you can’t control. The thing we can control is that balance between artificial intelligence, where it goes by ’29, and what that does to the human jobs market.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Okay, so just next 3 years, that’s the prediction. Next 3 years, actually, I don’t think it necessarily takes all the jobs that actually we’ve been expecting. I don’t know if you’ve been following what’s happening with mammograms. People talk about mammograms because they always thought that radiologists for mammograms were going to lose their jobs first because AI can read a mammogram better than a person. There are more people who are radiologists doing mammograms than ever before. Why? Because the price of mammograms has come down and more people are getting mammograms than ever. And somebody still has to read them and still has to talk to the patient personally. So I think there’s going to be an opportunity.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, what about, say, legal clerks, right? Their job is to just go and find old case studies. If you—

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Yes, those people are not going to have jobs.

PIERS MORGAN: Right. So then what happens to the ladder in industries like that?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Because you have to— The apprenticeship.

PIERS MORGAN: Right. So what happens to those people? Because if you can’t get on the ladder, then surely the whole ladder eventually just falls.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So this, this is to me the issue. And what I don’t know is, is that over the next 2 or 3 years or is that over the next 5 or 10?

PIERS MORGAN: I think it’s going to be incredibly quick.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So I think it’s going to be slow and then incredibly—

PIERS MORGAN: When you see companies like Facebook and others getting rid of thousands of people, the moment that starts to happen and they’re citing AI as the reason, but that surely has to accelerate.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I’m a little worried that there’s a little bit of theater going on in some of these announcements right now. I think people are using AI as an excuse for firing people, and I’m not sure that’s the actual case. By the way, one of the things that’s happened in the last 2 weeks, the cost of using AI is so incredibly high. Companies like Uber are saying that the ROI, the return on investment, doesn’t make sense, that they’d actually prefer to use engineers. So I think this is going to play itself out for some time. Then I think there’ll probably be a cliff, and there’s going to be a big question about what that transition looks like. I think that’s when it becomes a political and policy story. But I think it’s probably a 2029 story.

Lessons from the 1929 Crash

PIERS MORGAN: What’s the number one lesson we should learn from this, from the ’29 crash?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: The lesson of Warren Buffett, it’s to have humility. It’s not to chase the next thing. The phrase FOMO did not exist in 1929, but boy, do we have it now. And when we see folks making a fortune, everybody wants the lottery ticket. Everybody wants the ticket. The problem is, most people who buy the ticket lose.

Ryan Cohen Responds: The GameStop-eBay Deal

PIERS MORGAN: Talking of people potentially winning or losing, after your highly entertaining interview on CNBC Squawk Box, you pressed Ryan Cohen on how GameStop could possibly finance its $56 billion bid to acquire eBay, saying the math just didn’t work. So he came on Uncensored to respond. He said this:

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

RYAN COHEN: I was surprised by their lack of understanding of the structure because it’s very simple. It’s half cash, it’s half stock. We have the ability to issue stock. Essentially, the eBay shareholders are going to continue owning eBay, except it’s going to be run by an owner-operator as opposed to an entrenched management team. That has zero invested and zero skin in the game. And the other half of the structure, we’ve got $9 billion of cash on our balance sheet, and our bankers have advised us that they feel confident in our ability to raise $20 billion. So it’s a straightforward deal. But it’s too complicated for them on CNBC.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

PIERS MORGAN: Now, the reason I wanted to play that to you is because it was way too complicated for me to understand whether anything that he said there was actually credible. You’ve now heard it. He says it’s too complicated for you to understand. I would beg to differ. But from what you just heard there, which was his kind of clarifying explanation, what would your response be?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: So look, I think what he is trying to do is slightly different than what is a classic acquisition. And I just, for the record, I did understand exactly what the transaction was. I was desperately trying to get him to explain it to the public in a way that they could understand it.

In terms of what the deal is, typically when you buy a company, you have more money than the company that you’re buying and you’re buying out their shares. In fact, he said that he was buying it at a premium. That’s not exactly what this deal is. He’s paying some money to the company, but he’s effectively telling eBay shareholders, you are going to roll in with me, meaning a big portion of your shares are still coming here. So I’m not really buying you out at all. You’re going to roll in with me.

And if you like me as the manager and think that what I’ve done with Chewy— he had a great success with Chewy. If you think that what he’s doing with GameStop was great, then you’ll follow down this path. And that’s what the deal is.

The question is he needs to ultimately persuade those eBay shareholders. And those eBay shareholders are big Wall Street institutions, by the way. It’s not retail investors necessarily. There are a lot of retail investors in GameStop, got them very excited about GameStop. He’s got to persuade BlackRock and T. Rowe Price and all the big funds that he’s the guy to run this and that they need to trust him. That’s what that story is.

PIERS MORGAN: Poly Market, when asked, will GameStop acquire eBay by the end of year? 15% are saying yes in the prediction market, down from 22%.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Where would you put the percentage? Look, I think it’s going to be a challenge for Ryan. I think he’s done a— by the way, he did a great job with Chewy. I think he’s doing a good job with GameStop. Could he pull it off? This year, I think would be very, very challenging, like almost impossible challenging. But that’s because he effectively would have to get the board, which doesn’t want to hand over the reins, and he’d have to get all the big institutional investors behind him. Could he ultimately do it? Like, over time? Maybe. But it’s not an easy one.

SpaceX’s Upcoming Float and Elon’s Next Move

PIERS MORGAN: Is an easier one what’s going to happen to SpaceX when it floats in a couple of weeks?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Is that going to be the rocket that we all expect? So, it’s interesting. It’s a rocket that almost invariably has to be a rocket for the first couple of weeks, because the NASDAQ, the stock exchange where it’s going to go public, has an index fund called the QQQ. Anyone who buys the NASDAQ index fund is automatically, within the first 5 days, going to be buying shares of SpaceX. So there is effectively an automated buyer of SpaceX shares. And by the way, there are other investment funds out there that try to mimic the NASDAQ fund. So they have to automatically buy shares too. So I think in the immediate aftermath, there will be lots of shares moving higher.

Having said that, Elon’s done something very interesting. Talk about the democratization of finance. He’s allowing a lot more retail investors to buy in than historically.

PIERS MORGAN: Why is he doing that?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: He believes in this idea of democratizing finance and believes there’s a big audience for his shares. The question— it’s going to be a big test. Most companies don’t put the shares in retail investors’ hands immediately, because they’re not considered diamond hands. They’re considered quick hands that they may sell if the stock moves too high. So it’s going to be a very interesting one to watch.

PIERS MORGAN: I sat with 3 billionaires about 3, 4 years ago over lunch. And I just said to them, come on, if you could invest in one stock, what would it be? And they all said SpaceX, which I thought was very interesting. So it’s going to be a fantastically exciting watch for the next move.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Elon’s next move. SpaceX, I think, is going to ultimately buy Tesla. I think that’s inevitable. And they’re going to rename the company X for the whole thing. Really, that’s my call.

Closing Thoughts: Lunch, Power, and the 1929 Book

PIERS MORGAN: That’s a big call, but you’re usually right. I want to end with one simple question. In Wall Street, perhaps the most iconic movie about Wall Street, obviously, but about the financial world. The classic Oliver Stone film. There’s the line, lunch is for wimps. Do you go to lunch?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I used to go to lunch. These days I don’t really go to lunch that much.

PIERS MORGAN: You concluded lunch is for wimps?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I just don’t know what the power lunch is anymore.

PIERS MORGAN: I’ll tell you where it is.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Maybe when we go to lunch.

PIERS MORGAN: No, it’s Michael’s. It’s Midtown Manhattan with our mutual friend Jonathan Wald. Absolutely. Isn’t that the epicenter of power lunches?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: The epicenter of power in New York.

PIERS MORGAN: Andrew, great to see you. 1929: Inside the Crash. As you’ve got here, a quote here from David Grann, “riveting and illuminating.” It certainly is, and a massive wake-up call for all of us right now. Here’s to you.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Great to see you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Ryan Cohen Joins Live: Hostile Takeover on the Table?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, joining us now to react to that interview is Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop. So Ryan, you were listening there to Andrew. It was a little glimmer of hope. He didn’t think it was impossible, just very difficult. What’s your reaction?

RYAN COHEN: It reminds me of the movie Dumb and Dumber where the girl tells Jim Carrey— he asked, what are my chances? And she says, like, 1 in a million or something. And he says, so you’re saying there’s a chance.

PIERS MORGAN: I mean, look, Andrew is, notwithstanding your little dig which I played to him, that he didn’t understand it, I think he does understand it and he outlined just now the reasons for his concern and wanting you to really articulate how you thought this would work. I mean, do you understand his concerns? Do you accept that he is pretty expert in this and the concerns are valid?

RYAN COHEN: Yeah, I mean, it’s tough. Everything that I’ve done has always been tough. If you would have looked at what the chances of Chewy to succeed against Amazon, the odds were very, very low. And turning around GameStop, if you asked all of Wall Street what they thought the business was going to be doing in 2026, when I joined the board, I would have said that the company would have been bankrupt a few times over. So yeah, this is tough.

PIERS MORGAN: There have been reports today saying that you’ve not given up on this project and you may now take your proposal directly to shareholders for an attempted hostile takeover. Is that true?

RYAN COHEN: I’m definitely not going to give up. I’m not going to stop.

PIERS MORGAN: So you’re not denying the report which includes the proposal potentially direct to shareholders for an attempted hostile takeover? Is that bit true?

RYAN COHEN: Ultimately, the owners of the business are the shareholders, and the fate of the business is going to be decided by the owners of the business. And the vote is going to come down to who they want running the business. Do you want an entrenched management team that’s collecting tens of millions of dollars in risk-free compensation running the business, or do you want someone that’s putting all his chips on the table, both through GameStop and me personally? Ultimately, the management team and the board has all kinds of perverse incentives. But I’m going to do everything to make sure that ultimately the owners of the business get to make that decision.

PIERS MORGAN: That doesn’t sound like a denial.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: It’s not a denial.

PIERS MORGAN: So that is news. So you are seriously considering a hostile takeover?

Ryan Cohen on SpaceX and the Entrepreneurial Spirit

RYAN COHEN: Going to do whatever we need to do in order to maximize shareholder value for GameStop. And we’ve made a big investment. We’re one of the largest active shareholders of the business. And I love eBay and the business is highly complementary to GameStop’s business. And it’s a business that I personally understand very well and is within my circle of competence. So we’ll see what happens.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I’ll look forward greatly to your next move on that. Just very quickly, SpaceX, we just heard Andrew talking about it, that it’s going to be a rocket launch, but it’s going to have to reach rocket levels to justify, I guess, all the hype. What’s your view about it?

RYAN COHEN: I wouldn’t bet against it. I wouldn’t be arrogant enough to bet against Elon. And what I find interesting on all the skeptics on Wall Street is how quickly they are to take the side of the establishment. I don’t know what it is. Maybe they play by the rules. They go on the show, they answer all their questions, they bow down to them, they get together in the Hamptons. I don’t know what it is, but there’s nothing that is more American than risking your own money. And if you end up making money, great. And if you end up losing money, then you lose money.

And yet you look at the mainstream media, like with GameStop as an example. And it’s almost like everyone is rooting and wants to see our demise. And it’s the same thing in this situation too. They want to see us fail. They hope we fail. And it doesn’t really make sense to me. It’s anti-American. What we’re doing is tough, but we’re taking on risk.

And if you look at the current management team and the board, you’ve got a board of directors that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for attending a few board meetings. You’ve got a management team, you’ve got a CEO in particular that’s making tens of millions of dollars, have never bought a single share of stock on the open market with his own money. And yet why are they so quick to protect and want them to succeed.

You know, you talk about wealth inequality and all of these systemic risks. And then you have someone that’s taking on a lot of risk and putting a lot of skin in the game and it’s like, why do they want us to fail? I don’t understand.

PIERS MORGAN: You know, I love entrepreneurs. I think they make the world go around. I think that most people are risk averse and play safe in their lives and their business. And actually, if it wasn’t for people like you and Elon Musk and others, the world would be a very dull place. And sometimes you’ve got to speculate to accumulate, and you may crash and burn. But as we learned in Top Gun, sometimes you will crash and burn, but other times you’re going to win.

And I wouldn’t bet against you either, Ryan. I’ve enjoyed talking to you the few times we’ve done it. I hope we continue to do it. And if you pull it off, it’ll be amazing. And if you don’t, well, you had a go.

RYAN COHEN: I appreciate it, Piers. We’re on the same page.

PIERS MORGAN: We are. And we will talk again. Ryan, thank you very much.

RYAN COHEN: Nice seeing you.

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