For about 10 minutes just before 9 a.m. ET on Sep. 4, all eyes in the world of business and politics were on a circular desk on the floor of the Nasdaq stock exchange in Times Square, just a few feet from where the opening bell is rung every weekday.
Bill Pulte, the controversial director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was beamed into the room via satellite, and he faced a grilling: Squawk Box anchors Andrew Ross Sorkin, Becky Quick and Joe Kernen each took a turn lobbing tough questions at their guest about mortgage fraud criminal referrals he has made, including one for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, with President Trump citing the referral as cause for her termination.
As tourists (and one vest-wearing finance bro sneaking a peek) wandered through Times Square outside the windows just a few feet behind them, Sorkin, Quick and Kernen set each other up for followups, quizzing Pulte about the source of his tips, whether the referrals were partisan in nature, and whether Jerome Powell should resign.
Of course, the TV business is rarely as glamorous and dramatic as it appears onscreen. Seconds after the anchors thanked Pulte for appearing and handed things off to Squawk on the Street, the production crew were tearing down the set and prepping for the opening bell. No time to waste, the market has to open at 9:30 a.m., and the studio needs to be turned over.
“He came on here knowing what was going to happen,” Kernen says, speaking with The Hollywood Reporter alongside his co-anchors in a nondescript office deep within the Nasdaq building. Squawk Box, he notes, has a reputation being able to book guests that otherwise almost exclusively appear on Fox News, while also booking guests that are regulars on MSNBC. “The last time he was [on TV] is when he went on with Maria [Bartiromo], and that did not happen.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin, Becky Quick and Joe Kernen have steered the direction of Squawk Box on CNBC.
CNBC
Business has always influenced politics, and politics has always influenced business. But there hasn’t been a time in recent memory where the lines between the two have been more blurred.
After all, the President of the United States is a creature of corporate America, now leveraging his office to alter seemingly every aspect of business, through tariffs, firings (some driven by referrals from Pulte), appointments and novel legal theories.
And Squawk Box appears uniquely positioned to capture that dynamic every morning, the one place where Republicans (including President Trump himself), Democrats (like Sen. Elizabeth Warren) and corporate titans (like Warren Buffett and Andy Jassy) feel they have to be in order to get their message to an audience that needs to see it.
Sorkin, Kernen and Quick have been anchoring the show together for the last 14 years, with Kernen serving as the doyen of the group, going to back to its 1995 debut.
“The biggest response we get has to do with the this unbelievable battle that we’re in right now for for what the United States is and what it’s going to be, and business is the backdrop of what’s going on, but look at [New York City mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani and the rise of socialism and the way young people view government and business and everything else. That’s the water cooler talk,” Kernen says of the show’s evolution. “Individual mergers and names, we still cover those things, but we have become more based on what’s happening in Washington than we ever were in the past.”
“Donald Trump came along in 2017 and there might have been four years of Biden, but this has changed what business news really is,” he adds.
“I go back even further, I think post-financial crisis, I think this was very much a business show,” adds Sorkin. “The network was very much focused almost exclusively on the concept of business. But now business and policy — and I say policy, not politics –business and policy are so integrated. Every business person now thinks they’re a politician. Think about all the CEOs who are going to be at the White House tonight [Trump hosted tech executives including Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg], And every politician now feels like they need to understand and try to influence the business world.”
“I was going to say that the financial crisis too, that’s when it started,” Quick adds. “We became this Washington-Wall Street kind of connected world at that point. I thought at some point it would kind of devolve and go back, but we’ve never gone back, because policy has never backed out of the conversation.”
The interplay between the three anchors and their distinctive personalities was on full display, as it was a short while earlier in the show’s first floor studio, when it was Pulte’s turn in the hot seat.
What makes the show interesting, however, isn’t just the chemistry between the trio of anchors, though that is certainly part of the equation. It is also the relationship between the show and the centers of power on Wall Street and, increasingly, in Washington D.C.
“What’s so interesting with the audience is the audience is a lot of these guests, right? So you have Elizabeth Warren on one end, who’s both a guest on the show and watching the show, and then you have Ted Cruz on the other end,” Sorkin says.
“But I also think it’s the fortune 500 CEOs who are watching,” Quick adds. “I mean, that’s to me, what the power of the show has always been. It gives us the freedom to be able to do more because when you have that audience, they come on because they want to talk to their friends, they want to talk to their peers, they want them to be influenced.
“It’s before their day gets really crazy, right?” she adds. “They can listen starting at 6 AM when they’re working out. What we hear from them, is ‘I get so much feedback when I come on the show.’”
“It’s like catnip for them,” Kernen adds, leaning back in his chair.
It’s not hyperbole. One C-suite executive in the media sector, who asked not to be named because they work at a company with a TV news operation of its own, tells THR that Squawk Box is the only news program they watch every weekday morning.
The Squawk Box team at the billionaires’ Davos summit in 2016.
For the celebration of the show’s 30th anniversary this week, the show’s influence among the Fortune 500 set will be on full display, with a veritable who’s who of business and economic titans set to make appearances: From investor Leon Cooperman and Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin to New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, among a number of other billionaire boldface names.
The lineup underscores how, as CNBC president KC Sullivan says, the show is “a cornerstone of CNBC’s brand.”
“Every morning, the show sets the agenda for the business day ahead — not just reporting on the markets, but shaping the conversations that define them,” Sullivan says. “It’s the place where the most powerful voices in business and policy connect with the most influential audience in television: the decision-makers who move markets, shape policy, and lead industries.”
“If you could look at the inboxes of Becky and Joe and myself during the show and see who’s — I don’t want to say who, but all sorts of people all the way from the White House to the corner office of Fortune 500 if not Fortune 50 companies — who are emailing in saying, ‘I can’t believe so and so said that,’ or ‘by the way, are you thinking about this issue today?’” Sorkin says. “I mean, it’s become almost a community where some of the most influential people in the world are all watching and interacting with each other.”
But the show has also sought to appeal to a “broader audience,” as Sorkin says, an “aspirational” audience that has their own ambitions, and sees Squawk Box as a window to that world.
“Putting people inside the room, I think that’s a huge part of it,” Sorkin says. “The broader public wants to be in on these discussions. By the way, they’re watching Bill Pulte too, they’re all fascinated by this. They’re talking about this at their office during lunch and saying, ‘what the hell is going on here?’ having access to these people in the most newsy, important moments of their life, good and often bad, is fascinating.”
“Would Bill Pulte have ever led our coverage when he was the head of Pulte Homes? No, it’s different now,” Kernen chimes in. “There’s a reason why that interview was so timely and water cooler.”
“I just think that the aperture is broadened,” Quick says of the show’s expanding influence. “You have more than just the CEOs who are watching it. You have the political and policy leaders. You have people in universities who are thinking about these things. You have big investors who are trying to figure out what to do with their money.
“Look, we are very aware that a lot of them will have an axe that they want to grind,” she adds. “They have a reason for coming on because they have something they want to get across. I think it’s our job to kind of shake it up, shake them up a little bit so that they are saying more than just the scripted message.”
It’s a formula that has found its groove, even if it has evolved somewhat.
“We’ve always tried to have a core of timely and accurate business news, but it’s always been done in a way that, we hope, brings in a wider audience than just geeks that want to hear about earnings per share and things like that,” Kernen says, before adding with a wink: “I think all of us would have gone crazy, if we were Bloomberg, for example. I’m not trying to trash a competitor, but they do something different. They probably do it pretty well, though I can’t watch it for more than a couple of minutes, so I really don’t know.”
Of course Squawk Box, like everything on CNBC, is nearing a major transition. The channel will be spun off from Comcast and NBCUniversal into a new company, Versant. That transition will bring with it some advantages (the conflict of being a part of the Comcast empire is diminished) but also challenges. Versant will be a much smaller company, and CNBC will be arguably its most valuable asset.
The pressure, in other words, will be on, and change will follow.
“There’s investment in the brand,” Quick says of what’s next for CNBC. “I think it’s great for us, because before, we used to have a lot of the money that we made siphoned off to fund things like Peacock or to pay for the sports rights on different things, now it can be spent back into CNBC.”
“I think of all of the assets that Versant has, if you think about CNBC, and the power of what CNBC can be as a business news platform, and I think of us as a platform and a brand,” Sorkin adds. I think of Squawk Box as sort of the central franchise of that brand.”
“The most cliche thing in media is content is king, but I mean, we’re live. You can’t really DVR us. We’re time sensitive, because the [jobs] numbers come out at 8:30,” Kernen says. “I’m not saying we’re the NFL, but there’s not too many things left like that, I don’t care what tubes they use to bring us, I don’t care who owns us or how we’re going there, but I think there’s always going to be those people that are going to want to watch what we’re doing.
“I’m more worried about how someone’s still gonna pay for my iPhone, and I’m trying to transition over the healthcare,” he quips. “We were [part of] a $200 billion company, we’re gonna be an $8 billion company, but we’re excited because it’s gonna give us the flexibility, I think, to do things we couldn’t do before.”
And the show will bring its audience, from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to Wall Street, along for the ride.