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Inside Trump and Paramount’s ‘60 Minutes’ Settlement; How Elon Musk United the Left and the Right; CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud
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Good morning. Today, a new wrinkle emerges in the deal to settle President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News; Elon Musk pulls off a rare feat in polarized times; and executives are done dodging questions about whether AI takes jobs.
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President Trump’s lawsuit against ‘60 Minutes’ threatened to complicate Shari Redstone’s tortuously negotiated deal to sell Paramount. Illustration: Emil Lendof/WSJ, Getty Images
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President Trump’s team believes Paramount will provide an eight-figure “allocation” for ads, PSAs and other broadcasts promoting conservative causes as part of his legal settlement with the media giant, Jessica Toonkel and Josh Dawsey report on the negotiations.
That’s according to a person familiar with the matter. Paramount disagrees, saying the settlement “does not include PSAs or anything related to PSAs.”
We’ll see what happens, but a disconnect even after reaching the controversial agreement fits the pattern of the talks to get there.
Trump’s opening gambit to settle his lawsuit, which alleged that CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited a Kamala Harris interview, was an apology and $100 million—far more than others had paid to settle with the president.
That posed set up a stark choice for CBS parent Paramount, which needed federal approval to close a pivotal merger with Skydance.
After weeks of talks, the final figure was $16 million, a pledge to release transcripts of new interviews with presidential candidates, and no apology.
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“Can you hold power to account after paying it millions? Can an audience trust you when it thinks you traded away that trust?”
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— CBS News anchor John Dickerson to viewers of “CBS Evening News Plus” after Paramount’s deal to settle President Trump’s lawsuit over “60 Minutes”
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Tesla delivered 384,122 vehicles in the latest quarter but still failed to reverse months of declining sales. Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters
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Tesla’s global vehicle sales fell 13.5% in the second quarter, continuing a steep slide that analysts blame partly on consumer backlash against CEO Elon Musk, Becky Peterson reports.
Many companies have angered consumers on one side of the political divide or the other by now, of course, but Musk is doing something more striking, and probably harder to reverse: bothering everybody.
After angering EV-loving liberals by backing President Trump’s campaign and leading DOGE’s government cuts, Musk is now warring with Trump over the president’s megabill.
Morgan Stanley called the falling out with Trump a potential problem in a June note to investors. “While the situation remains fluid,” it said, “we believe the disagreement will not help Tesla demand but could potentially (temporarily) alienate multiple sides of the political spectrum.”
Related: Tesla has an aging lineup and slumping sales, but its CEO has shifted his focus to robotaxis and robots. [WSJ]
The much, much smaller EV maker Lucid said it increased deliveries in the second quarter—to 3,309. [WSJ]
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40%
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Punitive tariff on goods “transshipped” to the U.S. through Vietnam under a new trade deal, twice the 20% rate to be charged on
regular imports from the country. The measure appears squarely aimed at companies using Vietnam as a staging post to sidestep
steep levies on imports from China.
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‘Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,’ Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley said last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
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CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs, Chip Cutter and Haley Zimmerman write in a piece that advances this newsletter’s recent discussion about AI’s impact on agencies and marketing. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.
“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley said last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”
Corporate leaders have spent months whispering about how their work could likely be done with a fraction of their current staff.
But the Overton Window has been shifting as executives get a better sense of what the tech can do and see their peers change hiring plans.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Micha Kaufman, CEO of freelance marketplace Fiverr, in a memo to staff this spring. “It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person—AI is coming for you.”
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Kate Moss founded her Cosmoss line of fragrances, face cream and other products in 2022. Photo: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters
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Kate Moss’s skin care and wellness company Cosmoss has entered liquidation, the latest reminder that celebrity can’t always ensure a brand’s success. [WWD]
G/O Media, the onetime owner of sites like Deadspin and Jezebel, sold the videogame site Kotaku and said it is winding down operations. [NYT]
In a reversal of the usual order of things, an ad agency is leading its client’s search for a CMO. [Ad Age]
How can the ad industry protect its awards after the episodes at Cannes? [Campaign]
ChatGPT was headed for a different brand name until a smart late-night decision. [BI]
LoveShackFancy founder Rebecca Hessel Cohen says there’s an implied dress code at her parties in the Hamptons. It’s LoveShackFancy. [NY Mag]
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Note: CMO Today is off Friday in observance of the July Fourth holiday and will return on Monday. In the meantime, read CMO Today’s Katie Deighton on her two-week vacation across the South with three friends in an RV.
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