WHEN: Today, Thursday, January 23, 2025
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box” – “Money Movers”
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcripts of CNBC interviews with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Sara Eisen which aired on “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) through “Money Movers” (M-F, 11AM-12PM) today, Thursday, January 23 for Davos 2025 in Davos, Switzerland.
Interviews included: Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur, US Ski Team Olympic Gold Medalist Lindsey Vonn, Wharton School of Business Professor & Glassdoor Chief Worklife Expert Adam Grant, Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong, BlackRock Chairman & CEO Larry Fink, Morgan Stanley Chairman & CEO Ted Pick, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach, Scale AI Founder & CEO Alexandr Wang, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready, SHEIN Executive Chairman Donald Tang and Moelis & Company Founder, Chairman & CEO Ken Moelis
Links to video of the interviews are included below.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
Interview with Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur
KAPUR ON AI ENERGY DEMAND
VIMAL KAPUR: I think part of AI is also the whole energy story because increasingly, I’m hearing from our data center customers that basically we’re going to be constrained by power sooner or later. And then how does quantum fit in into the AI. So I think those were the AI discussions are getting into multiple streams, how do we use it, how do we make money, is power going to be constrained.
KAPUR ON SPINOFF PLANS
KAPUR: Elliot reached out to us in November to me. They’re another shareholder, and we are engaged with them. And their thesis is that two Honeywells are better than one Honeywell—
SORKIN: And you’d break it apart exactly how?
KAPUR: Those are, I would say at this point we are working with the board to see what’s possible, and what we have said publicly is that during our Q1, Q4 earnings call, which will happen in February, we’ll share more detail about what’s possible and what’s not possible.
KAPUR M&A OPPORTUNITY
KAPUR: M&A is not stopping because key for Honeywell is to rebuild its portfolio and it’s important that momentum we have, we don’t let it go, because we have built up a good momentum. We are working on several active pursuits in all the three segments, in aerospace, in automation and in energy. Now, of course, M&A is, as you know, name of the game is pen is not put to the paper, you never know, but we are actively working while we are dealing with some of the activities.
Interview with US Ski Team Olympic Gold Medalist Lindsey Vonn
Interview with Wharton School of Business Professor & Glassdoor Chief Worklife Expert Adam Grant and Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong
SUTHERLAND-WONG ON CHANGING WORK POWER
CHRISTIAN SUTHERLAND-WONG: And so now I think with that, and we’ve been talking about a lot at Davos is that there’s these new policies coming out as employers are back in the driver’s seat, around return to office, around changes to DEI policies. And so, it’s gonna be interesting to see how this plays out.
GRANT ON WORKER PERFORMANCE
ADAM GRANT: I feel like it’s been a pendulum, a shift back and forth between, okay, we’re going to care about people. We’re going to care about performance. In the short term, there are tradeoffs, but in the long term, what we know is caring about people is the best way to drive performance.
SUTHERLAND-WONG ON GLASSDOOR CHANGES
SUTHERLAND-WONG: When I first joined Glassdoor, I think, you know, people, people are always, their heads were in the sand saying, I hope this thing kind of goes away. And you fast forward 10 years to today, I think employers are much more constructive, and they start to really understand the whole premise of the if you engage your employees, it’s actually good for businesses. So the narrative has changed.
GRANT ON SUCCESS
GRANT: This pace of change is accelerating and I think what that means is the currency of success used to be ability, now it’s agility. And in the long run, the people you want to invest in are the ones who have the motivation and capability to learn.
Interview with BlackRock Chairman & CEO Larry Fink
Video: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/01/23/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-could-see-10-year-treasury-yield-hit-5-5-point-5-percent-and-shock-the-equity-market.html and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/01/23/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-i-want-the-sec-to-rapidly-approve-the-tokenization-of-bonds-and-stocks.html
FINK ON DATA CENTER SPEND
LARRY FINK: Right now, data centers represent about 50 gigawatts of power and if you use
the US estimates of how much power we’re going to need for data centers, it’s estimated to go up five times about 300 gigawatts of power. If you if that is all for data centers, it’s all for AI, you should assume for each gigawatt, it’s about a $40 to $50 billion spent on the framing, the chips, the coolant and all that stuff, the power sourcing and all that stuff. So it’s, we’re talking trillions of dollars.
FINK ON REDUCE DEFICIT
FINK: This is not going to be any one pool of money that’s going to be raised. You’re going to have to be raising money all through money all throughout all the different areas. The beauty of this, and this beauty of this growth for the United States is most of this money is going to come from the private sector. It’s not going to be ballooning our deficits. It’s actually going to probably reducing our deficit.
FINK ON GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY
FINK: And it is my opinion the country that we deny our advanced technologies the next phone call is to China, right? And so we have, this is, this is as large as we’ve ever seen in the role of the capital markets and issues and so, but we’re with our partnership right now, we’re working with many different company, companies and countries, and we really have the money too.
FINK ON CAUTIOUS OPTIMISTISM
FINK: I’m cautiously optimistic. That being said, I could I have scenarios where it could be pretty bad. I believe if it’ll unlock all this private capital, we’re going to have enormous growth. At the same time, some of this is going to create new inflationary pressures, right? And, and, and I do believe that’s probably the risk that is not factored into the markets. I think the bond market is going to tell us where we’re going.
FINK ON FED OUTLOOK
FINK: And the data at the moment is fine. You know whether they’re going to ease one more time or pause. I do not see any scenario in the short run that the Federal Reserve is going to reverse course. And my base case scenario is we’re going to have rates stay stickier. And what I mean by that is we’re going to have probably a more normalized yield curve. The yield curve is going to become steeper and steeper. So I can see a scenario of the Federal Reserve easing shortly.
FINK ON TOKENIZATION OF EQUITIES
FINK: As a huge believer of crypto and blockchain and tokenization, I mean I want the SEC to rapidly approve the tokenization of bonds and stocks that will simplify things, make things easier, some of the tax on BlackRock, BlackRock would never have to vote on a proxy vote anymore because every owner or record would be notified through a tokenization of equities. And we and it would save more money for more people, it would bring down the cost of ownership of stock and bonds.
Interview with Morgan Stanley Chairman & CEO Ted Pick
PICK ON EARNINGS OUTLOOK
TED PICK: We’ve been talking about growth and so you really have to not look at the earnings we’ve seen, but the earnings we think we’re going to see over the next 12, 24 months. That is kind of the indicator and the earnings continue to be strong. How many companies right now really talking about recession? If anything, they’re talking about inflation. So I feel like the earnings pull through, looks pretty sanguine.
PICK ON M&A
PICK: If you have the combination of some certainty around general rate framework and you know now that there is going to be discussions at the nation state level, well, gosh, I have to act that. Am I going to be a buyer, am I going to be a seller, am I going to do some financial engineering? And that’s why I’m bullish on the M&A cycle. I know some folks are still wondering, like, when’s it coming? And there could be a pacing of that, but I feel like it’s those two coming together, zero behind us, and, you know, kind of the global race in front of us, that breeds M&A and capital markets activity.
PICK ON VIBE AT MORGAN STANLEY
PICK: The reality is that we have some humility because very rare as a financial institution that gets to the brink and comes back. So in our good days and our good moments, we don’t forget that. When we’re hosting dinners for our global clients, we did last night, and we’ll do again tonight, we talk a lot about that, because you don’t want to get imprisoned by it. You got to transform. You kind of want to remember where you’ve been and that’s, that’s important.
Interview with Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach
ESCHENBACH ON WORKFORCE MAKEUP
CARL ESCHENBACH:Our business is dependent on labor. Today, it’s dependent on human labor. Going forward, it’s going to depend on both human labor and digital labor, right? So there’s always going to be incremental labor that’s being added, and someone has to protect all of those employees – whether they’re human and digital – they have to onboard them, right, they have to have policies, they have to have controls, right, they have to have access, right. Someone has to manage them and we think we’re uniquely positioned to manage.
ESCHENBACH ON AI DATA POINTS
ESCHENBACH:Not only do we have all that data, but we understand the context of what’s happening with that data, and we’re processing now 800 billion transactions a year on that platform, which gives us an ability to train off of that data That is so clean, to drive true output that will drive business value around AI.
ESCHENBACH ON THE AI REVOLUTION
ESCHENBACH:We’re truly in one of the most revolutionary tectonic shifts we’ve ever seen in technology with AI. We think that is going to drive an AI, right, skill set revolution. And what I mean by that, we’re going to move from a world, Andrew, where today we work with technology, you work with technology. In fact, most people spend the majority of the day using technology. We’re moving to a world where technology is going to work for humans.
Interview with Scale AI Founder & CEO Alexandr Wang
WANG ON CHINA AI PERFORMANCE
ALEXANDR WANG: That being said, you know, what we found is that DeepSeek, which is the leading Chinese AI Lab, their model is actually the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models.
WANG ON CHINA CHIP COUNT
WANG: Yes, my understanding is that DeepSeek has about 50,000 H1 hundreds, which they can’t talk about, obviously, because it is against the export controls that United States has put in place. And I think it is true that, you know, I think they have more chips than other people expect, but also going to go forward basis, they are going to be limited by the chip controls and the export controls that we have in place.
WANG ON DIFFERENT AI MODELS
WANG: What we see is different models are better at different things. So it’s hard to put a clear stack ranking among all the models. For example, the opening AI models are extremely good at reasoning, but the anthropic models might be really good at code and sort of, there’s a diversity of capabilities of the models. That being said, I think what we’re seeing in general is the space is becoming more competitive, not less competitive.
WANG ON HIRING ON MERIT
WANG: We operate in an incredibly competitive and fast-moving industry in AI, and I don’t have any option but to hire the best and most brilliant and most capable people for every single job inside my company. So as a result, we have no option but to be meritocratic.
Interview with Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries
FRIES ON SPINOFF POSITIVITY
MIKE FRIES: If a business is better off on its own and will trade better than it does inside the belly of the whale, give it. Give it freedom. And that’s what we’ve done here.
FRIES ON F1 EXCITEMENT
FRIES: Our car on the road right now beats an F1 car 0 to 60 by 30%. So that car is just gonna get faster, more powerful. It’s inevitable. Fans are excited about this. We have much more of a younger fan base, more female fans, and I think – look at it’s a global sport and at least 400 million – we need 400 million to be 800 million and Formula One is a fantastic business. Listen, it’s done incredibly well. And we think we’re in a pretty good wake there and we’re excited about the future.
FRIES ON MEDIA OUTLOOK
FRIES: I do believe that the flood gates are going to open, at least in terms of deal flow. What will get done? What won’t get done? Tougher question. But I do think people see a window here opening. And I think they will jump through it and I believe it’ll involve the entire sector, and deals that you could probably never consider or imagine in the past.
Interview with Pinterest CEO Bill Ready
READY ON PHONE FREE SCHOOLS
BILL READY: We’ve been focused on proving that there’s a more positive business model for social media, and it’s a huge part of why we’re winning with Gen Z. And so most recently, we’ve called for phone free schools to really give students a chance to focus in the classroom. It has a lot of great bipartisan momentum.
READY ON OPTIMIZATION
READY: We are focused on how we can, you know, build a platform that helps people find the inspiration to build a life they love. And so we focus not on, you know, the things that make you view the most, which is what a lot of other platforms have optimized for, is like, how do they keep you looking at the screen the longest? this, we’ve optimized for things that are going to help you find what you’re looking for.
READY ON INCLUSIVE PLATFORM
READY: People on our platform come from all walks of life, from all different backgrounds, and so we’ve been very focused, been very focused on how we drive inclusivity in our platform, with things like inclusive AI, with things like diversity by default in our feed.
SARA: But are you changing anything?
READY: We’re not and the reason is that what we have seen is we’ve done things like diversity by default in our feed or inclusive AI, it’s actually leading to better engagement. There’s consumer demand for is good for our business.
Interview with SHEIN Executive Chairman Donald Tang
TANG ON SHEIN BEING A FASHION ON DEMAND COMPANY
DONALD TANG: We are not a fast fashion company. We are a fashion on demand. And let me tell the evidence. The difference is fast fashion companies and traditional retailer, they mass produce the products they want you to wear. Either we, on the other hand, with an on demand business model, we micro produce the styles you want us to manufacture. So, we actually make the things according to the style you pick.
TANG ON TARIFF EFFECTS
TANG: Affordability is, is a big anchor, is one of very important things, yes, but it’s the whole package of it. It’s a value for money. And as long as all of those policies are applied or new rules applied equally and fairly to all, then we can continue to based on these same principles and continue to deliver the best products for our customers.
TANG ON WANTING TO BE A PUBLIC COMPANY
TANG: The reason why we want to be a public company. Being a public company embraces the very universal, unique mechanism for accountability. So if we can embrace that, that create most amount of public trust that is so crucial for this company for the long term growth. That’s the most important reason why we want to go public.
Interview with Moelis & Company Founder, Chairman & CEO Ken Moelis
MOELIS ON TRUMP ON BANK OF AMERICA
KEN MOELIS: Well, look, you’ll have to ask Brian that question. Maybe he didn’t hear it. I don’t know what the audio in that room was exactly. But again, this is Trump setting a direction. He feels that there was an imposition on conservatives through, you know, he made a statement that the return of free speech. Well, last I looked, freedom of speech is in the First Amendment. But I think Trump’s point was there seemed to be some bias on who got free speech.
MOELIS ON TRUMP OPTIMISM
MOELIS: I think one of the geniuses, one of the best things Trump does, he gets momentum. Think of the momentum that’s going on. Think of the everybody talking about the optimism. By the way, I would guess that less than 50% of the optimistic businessmen here were Trump supporters prior to the election. So it’s interesting that there’s optimism and yet they might have been on the other side of the election.
MOELIS ON STOCK OUTLOOK
MOELIS: I have never seen an economy, you know, Milei spoke today and you see what’s happening in Argentina, I have not seen an economy that deregulated, went for low-cost energy, and opened up freedom of activity that didn’t accelerate and do well. How well? We’ll see, but I haven’t seen one economy in the world that didn’t go in that direction.
For more information contact:
Jennifer Dauble
CNBC
t: 201.735.4721
m: 201.615.2787
Stephanie Hirlemann
CNBC
m: 201.397.2838
