Elon Musk Impresses Sun Valley Bosses

Elon Musk avoided discussing the collapsed Twitter deal while addressing an audience of moguls at Sun Valley on Saturday, two sources who attended the conference told Reuters.

In a wide-ranging interview, Musk spent much of his time talking about colonizing Mars and extolling the virtues of increasing birth rates on Earth, the sources said. Musk, CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Inc and rocket company Space X, has long advocated establishing a civilization on the red planet. Earlier this week, Musk said he would do what he could to help what he called the "depopulation crisis" after a media report said he had twins with a senior executive at his brain chip start-up Neuralink. He spoke about how birth rates are falling in rich countries and has researched the issue extensively on Twitter. Less than 24 hours after the billionaire entrepreneur announced the termination of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), he took the stage at the Allen & Co Sun Valley Conference, an annual gathering of media and technology executives in Idaho. The interview was conducted by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company founded by Musk and several others. Musk's arrival at the Allen & Co Sun Valley Conference this week brought a jolt to the off-the-record event where the headlines usually happen beyond the prying eyes of the media. "It looks like a complete mess," said one senior media executive, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the interview. "The guy is making his own rules. I wouldn't want to be in Twitter's shoes where you have to take this guy seriously." Sun Valley is typically treated like a sports version of the Met Gala, with photographers capturing the arrivals of fleece-clad media moguls and reporters noting the power lunches at the Konditorei café on site. On Friday, one Hollywood powerbroker expressed hope that the Musk interview would liven up the staid and cerebral atmosphere of this year's conference. Hours later, Musk's lawyers sent an eight-page letter to Twitter, announcing plans to cancel his deal to buy the social network. The document, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleged that Twitter had failed to respond to repeated requests for information over the past two months or seek its approval before taking steps that would affect its business, such as firing two key executives.