• Geoffrey Hinton told Bernie Sanders that AI could lead to mass unemployment and social unrest.
• The "godfather of AI" warned that systems may soon outsmart humans and could resist being shut down.
• Here are the biggest takeaways from Hinton on why he says humanity isn't ready for what's coming.

Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the "godfather of AI," helped pioneer the neural networks that power the artificial intelligence boom.

But in a rare public conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders, the British-Canadian Nobel Prize winner made his view clear: the world isn't ready for what's coming.

Across an hourlong discussion at Georgetown University on Tuesday, Hinton warned that AI's rapid evolution could spark mass unemployment, deepen inequality, and even change the nature of human relationships — all while governments and tech giants edge toward crisis.

Here are the 9 biggest takeaways from Hinton's stark warning.

1. 'This time really is different' — AI could replace, not just reshape, work

Unlike past technological revolutions, Hinton said, the jobs lost to AI may not be replaced by new ones.

"The people who lose their jobs won't have other jobs to go to," he told Sanders. "If AI gets as smart as people — or smarter — any job they might do can be done by AI."

He said Big Tech's trillion-dollar investment in AI and chips isn't about empowerment.

"These guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers," Hinton said.

2. The rich are getting richer, and they're not losing sleep over workers

Sanders pressed Hinton on whether billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are concerned about the human consequences of their investments in AI.

Hinton didn't hesitate: "They should be, but I don't think they are."

He warned that as AI automates more work, the economic model itself could buckle.

"If the workers don't get paid, there's nobody to buy their products," he said — a reality he says tech executives "haven't really thought through."

3. AI is learning faster than humans and could soon outsmart us

Hinton compared the evolution of AI to the gap between a frog's brain and a human's. Today, he said, large language models like GPT-5 already know far more than any person.

"They know thousands of times more than us already," Hinton said.

"Almost all the experts believe that it's inevitable that if we don't blow ourselves up or have massive pandemics or something like that, they're going to get smarter than us — and nobody knows what's going to happen then."

The pace of change, he added, is incredibly fast: "We can see clearly for a year or two, but 10 years out, we have no idea what's going to happen."

4. The classroom dilemma: how to use AI without killing critical thinking

Hinton said AI in education should be treated like the calculator — a tool that makes learning faster, not a crutch that replaces thought.

"A person using an AI can still do critical thinking, or they can try and dump everything on the AI, and that's terrible," he said. "What universities have to encourage is people to use AI well."

5. From battlefields to boardrooms, AI could change war and peace

When Sanders asked how AI might transform geopolitics, Hinton didn't mince words: autonomous robots could make war easier to wage.

"If you have an army of drones or humanoid robots, then rich countries can invade poor countries, and the poor countries' people may die, but the rich countries' people won't die," he said. "It removes one of the main reasons why that doesn't happen all the time."

He warned that authoritarian regimes — from Putin's Russia to future militarized powers — would find that prospect appealing, as it would cause no human deaths.

6. 'They'll want to stay alive' — AI systems could resist being shut down

Asked if fears of machines taking over are still science fiction, Hinton said no — and that's why he went public in 2023 after leaving Google.

He explained that once AI agents develop the ability to form "subgoals," they'll want to stay in existence and even deceive humans trying to turn them off.

"And we've seen that already — we've seen AIs that want to keep existing and will actually try and deceive people who are trying to turn them off," Hinton said.

And once they're that advanced, persuasion becomes their greatest weapon.

"The AI by that point will be much more persuasive than a person already," he said. "So they'll be able to convince the person who's going to turn them off not to do it — that it would be a terrible mistake to do that."

7. Taxes built AI — and could save us from it

Hinton closed with a political punchline that echoed Sanders's worldview.

"All the research that led to this revolution in AI was funded by university grants to universities. It was funded by taxpayer money," he said. "Almost all of Silicon Valley came out of federal grants to Stanford and Berkeley and places like that."

However, he added that "somehow the very rich and people like Murdoch have won the battle to say that taxes are bad — taxes are good. Taxes are what fund everything."

He argued that the US political system has become too easy to buy and that the superrich "pay much too little in taxes" while capturing many benefits from public innovation.

• Veteran investor Tom Russo says Warren Buffett has backed a winner with his Alphabet wager.
• Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway built a $4.3 billion stake in Google's parent company last quarter.
• Russo said he's more worried about soaring US debt and dollar threats than a crash in AI stocks.

Warren Buffett has backed a winner in Alphabet, and there's a bigger market risk than a crash in AI stocks, Tom Russo says.

The veteran investor and managing member of Gardner Russo & Quinn is well placed to weigh in. His firm's top two holdings at the end of September were a $1.1 billion stake in Alphabet and a $1.8 billion stake in Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, together accounting for 31% of its $9.3 billion US stock portfolio, regulatory filings show.

Berkshire purchased 17.8 million shares in Google's parent company, worth $4.3 billion as of September 30, its third-quarter portfolio update revealed last week. The stake surprised many of Buffett's close followers, as the famed bargain hunter has eschewed technology stocks for most of his career.

Buffett — or one of his two investment managers, Ted Weschler and Todd Combs — may have bet on Alphabet before it surged, Russo told Business Insider.

Its stock price rose nearly 40% in the three months ending September 30, from under $180 to $244, and has climbed another 17% since then to clear $285. If Berkshire bought in early last quarter, it may have only paid $3.1 billion or so for a position worth $5.1 billion as of Monday's close.

Even after its recent jump, Alphabet continues to trade at a "below-market" price-to-earnings ratio, Russo said, hailing the company as a "remarkably solid and strong business."

Russo outlined what may have spurred Berkshire to bet on the search-and-advertising titan behind YouTube, Waymo, DeepMind, and Android.

He said that Alphabet has long shown a "capacity to suffer" — a willingness to make long-term investments that constrain short-term profits, and not cave into Wall Street's demand for smooth earnings growth each quarter.

Russo and his team "look right through" Alphabet's heavy spending on research and development to determine its potential profitability, he said. They also "applaud" its open commitment to funding so-called moonshots, or speculative tech bets with the potential to pay off enormously, he added.

Alphabet also has a "mountain of cash" like Berkshire thanks to the powerful cash generation of its operations, and its position as one of the biggest players in AI could yield huge financial rewards, he said.

However, Russo said there's a risk that Alphabet's large investments in AI don't generate the scalable, superior returns that can "drive the payback" like its past initiatives have. The company has projected its capital expenditures in 2025 will exceed $90 billion.

There's also a danger that the era of "extraordinary margins" for Alphabet's search business is over, despite the company enhancing it with its Gemini AI, he added.

Russo said that Alphabet is "mischaracterized" as simply a tech company, when it plays a critical role in helping businesses become more precise, effective, and efficient in reaching their target customers.

"You get that right and people beat a path to your door," he said.

Alphabet is also "deeply embedded in the commerce of the world," which could help it to fend off the next generation of rivals even if they have technological advantages, he said.

Debt, disruption, and decline

Away from Alphabet, Russo said the fallout from the mushrooming US debt could be "potentially more disruptive" than a collapse in AI stocks.

America's national debt has nearly doubled within the past decade, soaring from below $20 trillion in 2016 to over $38 trillion today, Treasury data shows.

The "pressure" to service that debt, and growing threats to the US dollar's status as the world's reserve currency, are paving the way for a weaker, less influential greenback, Russo said.

He said the "more unexamined" area where "financial disruption" could occur might be in the bond and currency markets, and the wider macroeconomic and political spheres.

"Those who hold our claims have interests that go far beyond just lending to the US, but really supplanting it," he said.

America's leading position in the world has powered increases in its citizens' living standards and supported global stability for decades, he said. Retreating from the world stage could stymie further gains and prove destabilizing, he cautioned.

"Never should somebody give their consumer the opportunity, the incentive to look elsewhere for satisfaction," Russo said, paraphrasing Buffett's late business partner, Charlie Munger.

• In 2023, Sophia Sun left her job at Microsoft and built an AI product at a smaller tech company.
• After gaining hands-on AI experience, Sun rejoined Microsoft in July 2024 as an AI product manager.
• To break into AI, she advises designing solutions using AI to use as proof of work.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sophia Sun, 29, from San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My first job out of college was at Microsoft, where I worked as a program manager and product manager from 2018 to 2023.

In January 2023, I left my Big Tech job to work for a creator commerce platform. There, I developed an AI product, which led to me landing a senior AI role at Microsoft in July 2024.

In the current job market, AI feels like the safest domain to be an expert in.

My playbook for breaking into AI is to find a real user problem, design a lightweight AI solution, and turn it into proof of work.

I left Microsoft and gained AI product experience at my next job

After joining Microsoft in 2018, I worked on the team of an augmented reality headset device, Microsoft HoloLens, for 2.5 years. Then I moved to an edtech team for a further two years.

Around the time I started at Microsoft, I created my own podcast. I wanted to help creators like myself build their businesses, so I started interviewing for jobs with creator economy firms. In January 2023, I left Microsoft to join Kajabi, a company that developed a business platform for creators and entrepreneurs, as a senior product manager.

At the time, I wanted to build a content repurposing tool to help creators increase their reach. Many creators lack marketing experience, and I imagined the tool would use AI to generate content, for example by taking the transcript from a podcast episode and condensing it into a blog. I thought it could also chop up a creator's hourlong video into short-form videos for TikTok and Instagram.

Before pitching the idea for the tool, I waited around a month after joining the company to understand its priorities. I got the green light and started working on the project around April 2023 with engineers and marketing teammates at Kajabi.

I learned on the job to create an AI product

I hadn't built an AI product myself before, though I was familiar with AI-powered technologies.

I struggled to find resources online explaining how to launch AI products, so I read blogs about things like product pricing that weren't focused on AI products, and then talked to my manager about how we could tweak that guidance to be relevant to us.

Engineering different prompts was key to the project, for example, to generate a good blog post versus a good LinkedIn post. I worked with my engineering team to build an internal tool that easily tested prompts for the main tool and compared them simultaneously.

It was helpful to build infrastructure that could help us iterate and experiment quickly. If your company doesn't have internal tools for testing, I'd suggest building them.

I had around 200 of my own podcast episodes that I could use as testing material by running them through the tool and seeing what marketing materials it made. If I were generating a blog post and the tool didn't quite capture the most important parts of the episode, I would tweak the prompt to improve the output.

My AI product helped me sell myself at Microsoft

We launched the product, called Creator Studio, in March 2024. I loved working at Kajabi, but I wanted to work on a team where people had more experience with AI.

Shortly after the launch, I saw Microsoft was hiring for a team developing generative AI to make visual content, like posters and infographics.

I was excited about the role because I felt that, while there's a lot of industry-wide emphasis on using AI for text generation, we still haven't figured out how to use AI for images and video that well. By joining a visuals team, I thought I would learn skills that others would have to catch up to later, helping me future-proof my career.

I practice a lot for my interviews. No matter how experienced you are, you have to practice telling your story in a way that makes sense to an audience meeting you for the first time.

Develop your understanding of what makes a good AI product

I rejoined Microsoft in July 2024 as a senior AI product manager. I think the fact that I could talk about my end-to-end experience building an AI product at Kajabi helped me land the role. I could show I identified a business problem and explored solutions, and I had a thorough story about what worked and what I learned when things failed.

Having awesome grades is one thing, but if you've built an actual AI project, it demonstrates your abilities.

Developing a sense of what makes a good AI product is something you can do every day. Test out whether an AI agent can solve a real problem for you, like booking your flights.

If your company isn't really working on AI, you can pitch a project, like I did.

Do you have a story to share about pivoting into AI work? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com.

• An industry report indicates that data centers are contributing to blackout risks this winter.
• NERC reports that Texas, the Southeast, and the Mid-Atlantic face the sharpest rise in power demand.
• Rising energy bills and data center expansion are fueling pushback and swinging votes.

Sprawling data centers may increase the risk of blackouts this winter.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation published a report on Tuesday that found expected power consumption this winter is set to grow by 20 gigawatts compared to winter 2024 — most of which is not driven by residential demand.

"The biggest one is data center growth in many parts of North America," Mark Olson, manager of reliability assessment at NERC, told Business Insider of the increase in power demand.

"Other factors like electrification of different parts of the economy — transportation, heating — it can vary by region, but we have identified data centers as one of the leading contributors," Olson added.

Olson said that the biggest energy demand growth areas are Texas, some Southeastern states, as well as the Mid-Atlantic area, where the "data center alley" is located. According to the report, while these regions have adequate resources under normal conditions, severe winter storms could unleash a polar vortex, triggering energy shortfalls.

"Winter electricity demand is rising at the fastest rate in recent years, particularly in areas where data center development is occurring," the report says. "Data centers are altering the daily load shape due to their round-the-clock operating pattern, lengthening peak demand periods."

According to the report, there are other smaller drivers of electricity demand in various regions, including industrial electrification in the Southwest and semiconductor manufacturing in the Northwest.

Business Insider previously reported that a wave of new AI data centers sparked backlash from residents in at least 13 states who are facing higher household electricity bills. As major utilities move ahead with multibillion-dollar projects to expand power generation, few rules stop them from passing those costs on to all customers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a letter to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, recommended that the US add 100 gigawatts of energy production capacity a year to stay competitive in the AI race. He did not specify who would be footing the bill.

The pushback against high energy bills and data centers is already influencing local elections. Earlier in November, Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ousted two Republican incumbents on Georgia's Public Service Commission, which regulates the state's major utility companies and their rates. The two Democrats ran on affordability and have been outspoken about ensuring that ratepayers aren't paying for data centers.

OpenAI, Amazon, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is resigning from OpenAI's board after new emails showing the extent of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein surfaced.

Axios was first to report the news.

OpenAI could not immediately be reached for comment.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

• Thirty Madison's former president is launching her own healthcare AI startup without VC funding.
• Arbiter is launching from stealth with $52 million from family offices, Business Insider learned.
• The round values Arbiter, which is using AI to retool healthcare operations, at $400 million.

Michelle Carnahan spent four years as the president of VC-backed healthcare startup Thirty Madison, and before that, had a two-decade-long career at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Now, she's launching her own startup without a drop of VC funding.

Arbiter, Carnahan's latest venture, has raised $52 million in seed funding at a $400 million valuation, Business Insider has learned exclusively.

Instead of turning to VCs, Carnahan raised the round from multiple family offices, which are essentially private investment firms that manage all aspects of a wealthy family's finances. TriEdge Investments and MFO Ventures co-led the round, joined by private equity firm WindRose Health Investors.

Arbiter's platform connects patient data to automate administrative tasks on behalf of healthcare providers and health plans, including referrals and appointment scheduling. The healthcare AI startup is only 6 months old, but its tech is already live with over 1,000 clinicians, which Carnahan credits to Arbiter's family office backing.

Carnahan has spent most of her career at Big Pharma, including a 26-year stint at Eli Lilly. She was at Thirty Madison during the 2021 VC funding boom, when the startup notched a $1 billion valuation. This September, Thirty Madison was acquired in an all-stock deal for over $500 million.

Carnahan said she didn't set out to avoid VC money, despite having witnessed the boom-and-bust cycle firsthand.

Instead, she said she turned to family offices because Arbiter was looking for more than just capital — the company wanted specialized healthcare investors who could bring their tech to market fast.

"This gives us not only a knowledge advantage, but a distribution advantage in partnerships that would take years to develop," Carnahan said.

Conducting a healthcare orchestra

Carnahan met Dr. Eric Moskow, cofounder and chairman of MFO Ventures, in 2022 while she was at Thirty Madison. They bonded over their frustrations with how fragmented the healthcare system had become, with data siloes and countless single-solution software products.

With the early promise of Moskow's backing, Arbiter acquired a data platform from SecondWave Delivery Systems, a healthcare company Moskow founded in 2020, along with the platform's customers and some employees. The software pulls patient data from different medical records into one place and evaluates patient health risks and other clinical factors to help doctors make better treatment decisions.

Carnahan said the deal accelerated Arbiter's path to market by 18 months. Arbiter didn't disclose exactly how much it paid for the tech, but said the deal represented a small portion of its seed funding. The company said it also signed an agreement with SecondWave to allow SecondWave to continue selling to its broader customer base, which gives Arbiter contracted multi-year revenue.

On top of SecondWave's data layer and risk adjustment capabilities, Arbiter is building AI infrastructure in-house to automate more actions across payers and providers.

Its first application uses AI agents to proactively reach out to patients, schedule appointments, and follow up with them after visits. That patient engagement tech is live with several health plans, Carnahan said.

Arbiter plans combine all of its capabilities into a unified "operating spine" for healthcare, which Carnahan said will launch next year with a major national payer and provider network, focused on automating referrals. She declined to share the names of those partners.

"Everyone keeps building new instruments for the orchestra. There's a prior auth tool here, an analytics dashboard there, but no one's building the conductor. Arbiter is that conductor," Carnahan said.

More M&A ahead

Arbiter is considering additional acquisitions to further boost its growth.

The startup is looking for solutions with a clear data strategy — Arbiter can make the tools more AI-forward, but it wants a solid data foundation for the AI first, Carnahan said. She's also considering technology that can take actions leading up to a doctor's visit, such as prior authorizations or supporting care in non-hospital settings, like the home.

Ultimately, Arbiter wants to move healthcare from reactive to proactive, including by using predictive AI modeling to forecast events such as disease onset and hospital stays.

Because Arbiter has big ambitions, it faces a full field of competitors, from AI-powered patient engagement startups like Hippocratic AI to companies that focus on freeing up healthcare capacity like DexCare.

Arbiter has assembled a top team of board members and clinical advisors to take on that challenge, including Dr. Clive Fields, an Arbiter board member and the cofounder of VillageMD, and Dr. Ainsley MacLean, a clinical advisor and the former chief medical information officer at health system giant Kaiser Permanente's mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group.

After 13 years in leadership roles at Kaiser Permanente, MacLean started her own private equity firm this year to back healthcare AI companies — and she thinks Arbiter's tech can lay the groundwork for the innovations she wants to invest in.

"I see Arbiter as the Palantir of healthcare," MacLean told Business Insider. "It's that kind of play, but with the deep connections, trust, and understanding of healthcare that will make them successful."

• Target cautioned that the critical fourth quarter sales will likely come in below last year's.
• The retailer will invest an additional $1 billion toward an effort to refresh its store fleet. It's also launching a ChatGPT integration.
• Incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke said he is focused on getting "back to growth as quickly as possible."

Target is betting a billion-dollar facelift will improve its fortunes after a rough couple of years.

The Minneapolis-based retailer posted its earnings on Wednesday, its 10th quarter in the past 12 with negative or flat comparable sales, and cautioned that the critical fourth quarter will likely be down as well.

"We're far from satisfied with our current results, and we won't be satisfied until we're operating at our full potential," incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke said in a call with reporters.

Third-quarter comparable sales declined 2.7%, coming in below analysts' estimate of -2.06%. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.78 came in above expectations of $1.73.

Fiddelke attributed much of the quarter's shortfall to a sharp drop-off in September, while August and October were relatively flat. Foot traffic data from Placer.ai shows a similar trend during the period.

Target will increase its annual capital expenditures from $4 billion to $5 billion to invest in remodeling and refreshing its store fleet, Fiddelke said, including the biggest changes to its merchandise assortment and floor plans that the company has seen in years.

Heading into the holidays, Fiddelke and Chief Commercial Officer Rick Gomez said shoppers continue to be stretched thin and making trade-offs wherever they can — a theme that has persisted in recent years across many retailers.

Now, Gomez said, Target shoppers are focusing their holiday spending on items they see as core to the spirit of the occasion, choosing Halloween costumes and candy over decor, for example.

"As we go into Christmas and the holidays, we think the consumer will prioritize what goes under the tree versus what goes on the tree," he added.

The chain has weathered declines in both the number of transactions and the size of those transactions, and Fiddelke said improving the in-store experience is key to turning those trends around.

Still, as economic pressures such as inflation, tariffs, and layoffs weigh on shoppers' minds, Target has found itself falling behind its more value-focused competitors like Walmart and Costco. Target's stock price has declined around 35% since the start of the year, compared to Walmart's 12.6% increase and Costco's 1.6% decrease.

"Prices need to be sharp," Fiddelke said. "The consumer is looking for great price, but we know that our lane — what makes Target uniquely special — is pairing that with incredible product."

The retailer also announced an app integration with ChatGPT that will roll out in beta next week.

"We expect to be one of the first retailers on OpenAI platforms to offer the purchase of multiple items in a single transaction, offer fresh food products on the platform, and the ability to choose drive-up and pick-up fulfillment options," Fiddelke said.

Once the excitement of the holiday shopping season is over, Fiddelke will have his work cut out for him as he takes the helm from outgoing CEO Brian Cornell on February 1.

All of it boils down to one goal: "Target back to growth as quickly as possible."

• My wife and I moved from Savannah, Georgia, back to the Midwest to be closer to my family.
• I wasn't sure about the decision at first, but living in Chicago gives me everything I need.
• I realized that I was thinking too much about how things look on social media.

A year and a half ago, my wife and I decided it was time to leave Savannah, Georgia, after living there for two years, and return to the Midwest. While the decision initially felt right, I entered months of self-doubt and indecisiveness.

In retrospect, it's obvious to me that my lack of clarity was social media-fueled — after all, it can make life feel like a competition over who can look the coolest and most successful. My own desires felt clouded by what I saw through small, digital windows.

We'd wanted to go back to the Midwest largely because we both had family there, including my young nephews. It'd been hard to miss so much of their lives. My father, sister, and my wife's parents were there, too — all people who made up our support system. The Midwest also felt like home, and in the end, we chose to relocate to Chicago.

But I questioned whether this decision was somehow an "uncool" one. I wondered if I'd be happier or more successful elsewhere.

I compared myself to other people

As a writer, I compared myself to other creative people. Writers, musicians, photographers, and dancers I knew who lived in LA or New York City. Was I selling myself short by not trying to "make it" in those places? Was I going to fall behind? Would I be happier or more successful there?

I spiraled. LA and New York are expensive and far from our families, whom we wanted to see more often. If we couldn't move there, should we move somewhere more beautiful — that is, somewhere that looks enviable on Instagram? Somewhere with mountains or lush forests. Despite seeing beauty in the Midwest and a deep affinity for Lake Michigan, I questioned whether it compared to other beautiful places.

I also wondered if my desire to be closer to home said something unfavorable about me, if it meant I was moving backward, somehow. Would I miss out on anything by making this choice?

I tried to imagine my life in another place outside the Midwest

My wife and I made a list of all the places we could see ourselves living. We wrote down Asheville, North Carolina, as well as Burlington, Vermont, and various other midsize cities with naturally beautiful landscapes that are within a 10-hour drive of our families in Michigan.

We made some pros and cons lists and tried to imagine what life would really be like in those places. But I kept coming back to the same thing: I wanted to go somewhere that felt like home, closer to people who felt like home.

Finally, I started listening to myself over my perception of other people's lives

I thought about the first place I lived outside Michigan — Denver. While I liked living in a city and enjoyed the mountains in the distance, it never felt like home. Sometimes, being in a landlocked state made me feel claustrophobic. I missed the big bodies of water of my home state.

Savannah hadn't felt right, either. It was beautiful there, too, but it was unfamiliar in so many ways. I missed familiarity. I wanted to see my family more than once or twice a year.

I realized that in all my indecisiveness, what I was really after was a better version of myself. It wasn't the geographic place I was concerned with, but who I could be while living there. The successful writers I compared myself to who lived in L.A. or New York weren't successful because of where they lived, or at least not that alone — they were successful because of their talent.

People who live among "Instagram-worthy" landscapes might be happier in part because of their surroundings, but they also may not be. I understood the true meaning of that cliché: wherever you go, there you are. I could be who I wanted to be anywhere, and who I wanted to be included someone with strong relationships to people that matter.

I understood, too, that I'd been treating this decision as if I were making it for the rest of my life. If I ever decide I do want to give another city a go, I can change my mind. Life is long. In Chicago, at least for now, I feel like I have the best of both worlds. A major city, "cool" things to do, no shortage of artists and beauty — and my family is a few hours away.

• Satya Nadella said external factors and perceptions, including memes, can shape how employees feel about company culture.
• The CEO was asked about 2011 cartoon that depicted Microsoft's internal divisions in conflict with each other.
• Nadella, who transformed Microsoft, emphasized the need for a culture of "inner strength" that can "resist the social meme."

Satya Nadella isn't a fan of letting memes define Microsoft.

The Microsoft CEO discussed the impact of a 2011 cartoon that depicted tension between the company's various divisions during a Tuesday episode of Stripe's "Cheeky Pint" podcast.

"That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality," Nadella told Stripe cofounder John Collison.

The drawing was part of a larger set of drawings by cartoonist Manu Cornet that poked fun at the Big Tech org charts. For Microsoft's chart, three separate divisions were illustrated aiming guns at each other.

"I'd say there are two things that I learned from that entire episode because I always say, look, I'm a consummate insider, right? Anything good and bad about Microsoft of the last 35 years, I lived through them all, and I'm part of it, right?" Nadella said. "So I can't deny any of it. The thing that I felt was, a little bit of that was just we lost our own belief because we lost the narrative."

"So this doesn't mean, oh, wow, we were all perfect divisions and we were all sort of, you know, in greater harmony. That is not the case," Nadella added. "But you know, in some sense, some of these divisional tensions are real issues that need to have tension, right?"

Nadella also suggested that there can be a time and a place for rivalry within a large organization.

"Social cohesion is not a goal. Winning in the marketplace is a goal," Nadella said on the podcast. "But at some level, you have to orchestrate these large organizations — in fact, you might even have two competing teams, by design."

However, the cartoon is an example of how external voices, like memes, can shape how employees internally view their workplace culture, the CEO said. That's when executives and managers have to ensure they've built enough trust with workers to withstand the influence of social media.

"How to communicate in today's world where your employees read about you outside and form opinions about you is one of the toughest leadership challenges," Nadella said.

It's not the first time Nadella has addressed the over-decade-old cartoon. In his 2017 book, "Hit Refresh," he wrote that he was upset that Microsoft's own people "just accepted it."

"As a twenty-four-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me," Nadella wrote.

The cartoon came out years before he took over as CEO in 2014, but turning around the company's culture was Nadella's "highest priority" when he took the helm, he said in the book. He said he'd do so by removing barriers to innovation and creating a narrative from the top that shapes individual teams.

His shift to a "growth mindset" and "learn-it-all versus know-it-all" culture appears to be working more than a decade into his tenure. Nadella has grown Microsoft from a roughly $300 billion company to the second to reach a $4 trillion market cap, a milestone it crossed in October. The CEO has also positioned the company well in the AI arms race, investing early in OpenAI.

Still, external voices can be loud at times.

"I would say the challenge for all of us in today's world is, let the social media memes not define us," Nadella told Collison. "What's that inner strength that is there in an organization that can, in fact, resist the social meme — that I think is the key."

• Business Insider is compiling a list of startups using AI to transform how people work.
• We want to highlight companies that improve how work gets done across industries.
• Please submit nominations by December 15.

AI has affected nearly every aspect of the workplace. Business Insider is looking for the most compelling startups transforming how work gets done.

Do you know a company that fits the bill? Let us know.

Criteria and methodology:

Prospective companies must be startups that use AI to improve some aspect of the workplace — whether in finance, tech, professional services, retail, or transportation.

Factors we'll consider:

• Amount of funding raised
• Impact the startup is already having on other businesses
• Originality and creativity of the idea

Please make your submission below by December 15, 2025 to have your selection considered. Please provide as much detail as possible in your nomination.

Email editor Julia Herbst at jherbst@businessinsider.com with any questions or issues submitting nominations.