Business Masterclass

Elon Musk and Sam Altman interview (2016): Building the Future

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Elon Musk talks with Sam Altman about the problems he thinks are worth working on, and how to judge whether an idea is useful enough to spend a life on. He names AI as the single most consequential item in the near term, then genetics, then a high-bandwidth interface between the cortex and the digital extension of ourselves, and lays out why he sees merging with AI as the best available answer to the control problem. He explains why the founding of OpenAI came down to keeping the technology out of the hands of a few, and why the danger he worries about is misuse and theft rather than a machine developing a will of its own. He also talks about starting SpaceX with what he estimated as under ten percent odds, how fatalism reduces fear once you accept the probabilities, and why technology does not automatically improve, using the pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and the retirement of the space shuttle as examples of capability being lost. The conversation closes on how he actually spends his time, with roughly eighty percent going to engineering and design, and why he now thinks the factory matters more than the car.

Recorded in 2016.

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Tim Cook Steps Down: The Man Who Made Apple an Trillion Dollar Empire

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Tim Cook led Apple for fifteen years, from 2011 until September 2026, and this episode traces the career that got him there and what he built once he had the job. He joined in 1998 out of IBM and Compaq, hired by Steve Jobs to fix operations, and the supply chain he designed became the foundation for everything that followed. Taking over a company most analysts expected to fade without its founder, he scaled the iPhone to billions of units, took Apple's market value from roughly three hundred billion dollars to several trillion, and turned services into a recurring revenue engine that made the installed base as valuable as the hardware. Apple Watch, AirPods, the shift to Apple silicon, and Vision Pro all arrived under him, as did antitrust pressure on the App Store, a late and awkward entry into artificial intelligence, and a deepening dependence on China that became both a manufacturing and a political problem. He was also the first openly gay chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. He hands the role to John Ternus and stays on as executive chairman, leaving behind the question of whether the machine he built can invent the next thing.

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Jensen Huang - AI, Computing, Culture, Leadership

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Jensen Huang speaks at Columbia Business School about the founding of Nvidia, the bet on accelerated computing, and how artificial intelligence became the industry it did. He walks through the original business plan he says he would never fund today, since the technology, the market, and the killer application all had to be invented at once, and explains how the search for a domain wide enough to fund the research but narrow enough to stay a hundred times faster than a CPU became the company's whole strategy. He talks through what it actually takes to train a large model, argues that a billion dollar cluster is a cheap check against a general purpose data center that generates nothing, and describes the shift from mining tokens to generating them. He also explains why Nvidia has never fabricated its own chips, why the company selects itself out of commodity markets on purpose, and why hiring the best people means choosing problems that are hard enough to discourage everyone else. The conversation closes on Moore's law, the effect of export controls and sovereign AI on the business, and his advice for anyone who thinks AI is coming for their job.

Recorded oct. 2023.

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Jeff Bezos letters to Amazon Shareholders 1998

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Jeff Bezos's 1998 Amazon shareholder letter, written as the company exploded from an online bookstore into a fast-growing e-commerce platform, adding music, video, gifts, and international stores in the UK and Germany, plus the launch of Amazon Auctions. Bezos explains why he wants employees "afraid" of customers rather than competitors, shares his famous three-question hiring philosophy ("Will you admire this person?"), and doubles down on Amazon's long-term, invest-aggressively strategy over short-term profits. A great listen for anyone into Jeff Bezos, Amazon's early history, startup culture, and long-term business thinking.

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Steve Jobs (1983): Personal Computing, Design, Innovation, Company Culture

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:25:46 GMT

Steve Jobs speaks at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen about personal computing as a new medium, and asks a room full of designers for help before the objects get ugly and stay that way. He argues that computers will soon occupy more of people's daily attention than their cars, that most consumer objects are no longer designed in America, and that making a computer look great costs nothing extra. He walks through the electric motor analogy behind Apple's existence, explains why every new medium starts by imitating the old one, and describes what a computer program actually captures compared to a television broadcast. He also lays out the plan to shrink Lisa from a breadbox into a book with a wireless link within five to seven years, predicts software will be sold down phone lines with free samples first, and talks about the free computer Apple was putting into every school in California. The session closes with his views on privacy, the workers displaced by automation, and why Apple keeps only three layers of management.

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Elon Musk 2007 Interview: Space exploration, Entrepreneurship, Electric vehicles & Innovation

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:00:00 GMT

In 2007 Elon Musk sat down to explain why he moved from internet companies to rockets and electric cars, and what he thinks it takes to make humanity a multiplanetary species. He talks through the Falcon 9 and Dragon program that would replace the shuttle in servicing the space station, why he considers a return to the moon the wrong target, and why the energy required for orbital flight puts SpaceX in a different technological league from suborbital rivals. He also lays out the full Tesla roadmap years before it happened, starting with an expensive roadster and stepping down to a mass market car around thirty thousand dollars, and argues the company is worth more as an example to the auto industry than as an acquisition. Along the way he describes the three areas he identified after college as most likely to shape the future, why sitting on a beach would be torture, and what it is actually like to work in a cubicle while building a rocket company.

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Jamie Dimon - Management and Leadership Masterclass

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Jamie Dimon speaks to JPMorgan's senior leadership about killing complacency, bureaucracy, and arrogance before they kill the company. He walks through the companies that disappeared over the last thirty years, why he distrusts P&Ls and expense allocations, and the specific habits he wants managers to adopt. Along the way he covers the 10% efficiency target, the mistakes he owns including the London Whale and his resistance to the cloud, and why he fired 500 coaches and brought the bank's guards back onto the payroll.

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Jeff Bezos: Conversation with Charlie Rose - 2001

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 06:54:58 GMT

Jeff Bezos sits down with Charlie Rose in Aspen to discuss customer obsession, brand building, and what it takes to run e-commerce at scale. He talks through the gap between Amazon's collapsing stock price and its improving fundamentals, the fulfillment and logistics problems he wants the company to own, and the innovation he believes will make online shopping compelling over the following decade. Along the way he explains why a brand that stands for a product category is worth less than one that stands for something abstract, describes how the Toys R Us partnership divides the work, and calls the investments in pets.com and wine.com his biggest mistake. He defends the land-rush mentality that made those bets rational while admitting the company held onto it roughly two years too long. The conversation closes with his cash position, the Q4 operating profit he was aiming at, and his claim that 99% of a startup's early survival is luck.

The interview is from 2001.

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Jeff Bezos: Conversation with Charlie Rose - November 2012

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:13:04 GMT

Jeff Bezos, C.E.O. of Amazon.com, explains why we're still in the Internet's infancy, the threat of cyber warfare, and how Amazon has made a business out of their cloud-computing platform.

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Jeff Bezos letters to Amazon Shareholders 1997

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:09:46 GMT

Amazon's first annual letter to shareholders is the most imitated document in modern business writing. Nearly every founder letter since has borrowed its structure, its long-term framing, or its language directly.

It is worth hearing what it actually said.

Nineteen ninety-seven was a year in which Amazon sold one hundred and forty-seven million dollars of books, grew revenue by more than eight hundred percent, and reported a loss. Bezos used the letter to explain why the loss was the plan. He told shareholders the company would prioritize growth over profitability, take cash flow over favorable accounting, make bold investments knowing some would not pay off, and measure itself on customer growth and repeat purchase rates rather than earnings. He closed by warning that competition was aggressive, execution risk was real, and the company still had a great deal to learn.

He also promised that the letter would be attached to every future annual report. It was.

Read in full

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