On Day 2 of the DealBook Online Summit, we will hear from more top leaders on the world’s economic challenges, innovation in the age of Big Tech and the role of corporations in addressing racial inequality.
Here is the lineup (all times Eastern):
9:15 a.m.-10 a.m.
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase
The chief executive of the nation’s largest bank will speak about the vast challenges facing the economy, and the measures that need to be taken to bring the United States together.
Further reading: It’s possible that when the pandemic abates, the economy will snap back on its own. But it could also be a long slog back to health.
11 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
Ruth Porat of Alphabet and Google
The chief financial officer of the search giant will give an inside view of Big Tech in 2020, the future of remote work and navigating internal and external policy debates.
Further reading: A victory for the U.S. government could remake Google and the internet economy it helped define.
12 P.m.-12:40 P.M.
Tim Sweeney of Epic Games
The founder of the maker of Fortnite will explain the future of interactivity and his battle to foster innovation while competing with larger rivals.
Further reading: Tim Sweeney’s yearslong crusade to rein in the power of tech giants like Apple and Google suggests that it’s not something he will easily drop.
2 P.m.-3 P.M.
The rapper and activist Killer Mike, Robert Smith of Vista Equity Partners and Ursula Burns, former chief of Xerox
This panel of leaders from the worlds of business and culture will discuss corporate pledges on racial equality and debate how business leaders can create lasting benefits for underserved communities.
Further reading: When corporations belatedly try to address issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, they often drop the responsibility on their few Black employees.
Albert Bourla, the chief executive of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, said that he was never personally pressured to meet the Trump administration’s desired timeline to develop a coronavirus vaccine, though he was certainly aware of it.
“The election was always, for us, an artificial deadline,” the Pfizer chief told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Tuesday. “It may have been important for the president, but not for us.”
Mr. Bourla was joined on a video conference by Heidi Larson, the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Bill Gates, the co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
There are still many unknowns surrounding a coronavirus vaccine, but “the fundamental questions” about efficacy and safety have been answered, Mr. Bourla said.
Pfizer announced last week that an early analysis had found its vaccine to be more than 90 percent effective. The company expects to collect the final safety data this week that it needs to submit its results to the Food and Drug Administration. Another developer, Moderna, announced on Monday that its vaccine candidate appeared to be 94.5 percent effective in an early analysis.
Watch the full session:
Senator Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday urged the incoming Biden administration to use all the “tools in their toolbox” to push through Democrats’ priorities — even as the party gave up seats in the House and remains at risk of being unable to take the Senate.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris “won on the most progressive agenda that a general election candidate has ever run on in the United States of America,” the senator told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. She cited some down-ballot victories, calling out Florida’s vote to raise the minimum wage and Arizona’s vote to raise taxes on higher incomes to fund education.
The election, she said, “is a mandate to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to do the things we can do.” She pressed for the cancellation of student loan debt, calling it the “single biggest stimulus we could add to the economy.” Ms. Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, also urged the incoming administration to invest in child care — “because we can do it” — and to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for employees of government contractors.
She said the pledge that Mr. Biden made to not raise taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year “makes sense.”
To achieve the Democrats’ aims, Senator Warren urged Mr. Biden to use “all of the tools — and I mean all of the tools of their administration,” which she noted included both executive orders and agency actions.
Ms. Warren, who has been floated as a potential Treasury secretary, declined to comment on whether she wants a role in the administration. However, she said she believed that “personnel is policy.”
“I think it is really important that we have people in this administration who understand the magnitude of the health crisis that we face, who understand the magnitude of the economic crisis — that is right behind that health crisis. And who have a real ambition for making the federal government work for people making it meet the moment.”
Ms. Warren indicated there might be room for Wall Street in the administration — even as a debate rages over what the limits should be on finance’s role in Democratic governance for the next four years.
“Remember, I hired people whose background was on Wall Street when I set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,” she said. “The question is: What does your overall team look like? It is important to have a team that brings a lot of different perspectives.”
She also expressed concern over the transition process, as President Trump refuses to concede the election and tries to challenge the results in court.
“The Republicans who are not calling him out — that is dangerous,” she said. “This is not a game — people around the world, people who would do us harm, are watching what’s happening.”
Programming Note: Video of the session with Senator Warren will be posted here soon.
With several Covid-19 vaccine trials showing initial promising results, hopes are high that we might soon put the virus behind us. But the reality is likely a lot more complicated, experts told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Bill Gates, the co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, explored the rush to develop an effective vaccine, and the political, social and behavioral obstacles that may hinder acceptance of treatments, even those deemed safe. He was joined on a video conference by Heidi Larson, the director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer.
Mr. Gates expressed surprise at the widespread resistance to public health measures in the United States. “I wouldn’t have expected mask wearing to become controversial,” he said. "I wouldn’t have expected the administration to find sort of the wildest fringe opinion possible.”
His organization was working on vaccine development before the pandemic, but people were disconnected from those “reasonably obscure” efforts. The attention the coronavirus has brought to his foundation’s work hasn’t always been positive, however. He expressed dismay over conspiracy theories circulating about his financial interest in vaccine development, saying, “They’re not true.”
“Where does that come from? Is it because these are uncertain times? People prefer a simpler story?” he said. “I hope it fades away, because we’re just trying to play a constructive role.”
Mistrust is problematic from a health perspective, the panel members said. Without trust in a vaccine and people willing to take it, infection rates won’t fall.
But it’s important to understand skepticism the public has been feeling, Ms. Larson said: “We have to appreciate that it’s been a hyper-uncertain time.” Her research has shown only about half of people surveyed would take a vaccine, but “there’s always a chance” that things can change, she added.
Distrust can be countered by building community momentum and listening to concerns, Ms. Larson said, and that may help persuade people to participate, as she has seen in work on polio eradication.
The one thing that seemed clear to everyone on the panel is that the pandemic has changed habits, perhaps forever.
“My prediction would be that over 50 percent of business travel and over 30 percent of days in the office will go away,” Mr. Gates said of a post-coronavirus world.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, spoke to DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Tuesday about the coronavirus, vaccines and how long people will have to take precautions. Recent news of initially successful vaccine trials from Pfizer and Modena have inspired hope, but a surge in cases across the country is causing alarm.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at the DealBook Online Summit that the return to normalcy depended on two elements: the effectiveness of vaccines and how many people take them. He said the vaccine trial results were “striking,” but he expressed concern that resistance to vaccination would reduce their overall effectiveness.
“We could be quite close to some degree of normality” by next fall, he said, but stressed that public health measures would continue to be necessary for some time.
“I can tell you, that really depends on whether we get the overwhelming majority of the people vaccinated,” he said. And a vaccine won’t replace public health measures “until you get to the point where domestically and globally we no longer have a pandemic or epidemic situation.”
Dr. Fauci resisted the politicization of the disease and protective measures. “A public health message like I’m trying to give is not encroaching on anyone’s freedom,” he said. “We’ve got to do everything we possibly can to pull together as a nation, and not as individual factions having differences that spill over into public health.”
“Public health really has nothing to do with politics,” he said.
“We’re all in this together as a nation,” he added. Citing evidence of 245,000 deaths and 11 million infections, Dr. Fauci said, “You can’t run way from the data.”
He noted the importance of the incoming Biden administration to work with the outgoing administration on a smooth transition. “I have been now dealing with six administrations in my 35 years as director. I’ve been through five transitions. I can say that transitions are extremely important to the smooth continuity of whatever you’re doing,” he said. “Right now, we’re in a very difficult public health situation.”
With the holiday season approaching, the infectious disease expert acknowledged that it would be up to people to decide what was right for them in terms of staying safe at gatherings. “Each individual family unit needs to make a risk-benefit assessment for what they want to do with the holidays,” he said.
His family is going to forgo a gathering and share a meal over video chat. “My daughters, who are adult professional women in different parts of the country, have made a decision,” he said. “They want to protect their daddy.”
Dr. Fauci suggested that with effective vaccines seemingly around the corner, now is the time to bolster health measures. Some have said that “following the science” in Europe hasn’t prevented an increase in infections, but Dr. Fauci blamed “Covid fatigue” for mounting infection rates there.
“We should use that vaccine to say that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Now that we see the end in sight, now is the time to double down, put away Covid fatigue.”
The doctor said that the pandemic was his long-dreaded nightmare: a respiratory infection that jumps species, spreads easily and has a high mortality rate.
“I am living that thing I feared the most,” he said. “Let us get out of this,” he added, before worrying about whether the world would remember the lessons learned from this pandemic.
Watch the full session:
Masayoshi Son, the founder and chief executive of SoftBank, has made billions from his prescient bets over the years, including an early investment in Alibaba of China. But, he told DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Online Summit on Tuesday, he still has made many mistakes.
In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Son spoke as much about his missed opportunities as he did his successes. His philosophy: “I would rather accept my stupidity and my ignorance — my bad decisions — so that I can learn from my mistakes,” he said. “It’s better to accept them, so I become smarter.”
He noted that he had the opportunity to become an early investor in Amazon, and even spoke with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief, about taking a 30 percent stake in the company before it went public.
He didn’t take it. “I’m so stupid!” he said, chuckling. “Don’t embarrass me.”
But Mr. Son also admitted making a big mistake with WeWork. SoftBank poured billions into the co-working business, betting that it would transform the nature of offices and “elevate the world’s consciousness” — and then was forced to bail it out after its plans to go public cratered.
“We made a loss on WeWork,” he said. “That was my mistake.” But he noted that the company had other hits, and its investments over all are up by at least tens of billions of dollars.
Mr. Son also expressed some admiration for Adam Neumann, the once-highflying WeWork chief executive who persuaded him to invest in the company in the first place. Mr. Neumann also made mistakes, Mr. Son said, but “I’m a big believer that he will be successful, and that he has learned a lot from his prior life.”
Watch the full session:
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