Today, I’m talking to Rohit Chopra. He was the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) until the end of January, when President Donald Trump fired him and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began trying to dismantle the agency.

The CFPB has been around for just under 15 years now. Congress created the agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from various kinds of lending and credit schemes that led to that crash.

Broadly speaking, the CFPB has been pretty popular! This is the agency that keeps consumers safe from predatory lending practices, limits credit card fees, and investigates various kinds of financial fraud. So effectively shutting it down kicked off a number of controversies, not least of which is: do Trump and Musk even have the power to do this? After all, the CFPB was created by Congress with a law, and the US Constitution says the president is supposed to take care that the laws passed by Congress are faithfully executed and not reinterpreted by an unelected billionaire who is deep into crypto. In fact, I don’t think that came up with the founders at all, though it’s been a minute since I watched Hamilton.

This all led me to ask Chopra several times who actually made the decision to fire him, who is currently responsible for the various policies of our government, and whether any of those things add up to a clear plan for which someone can actually be held accountable.

I ask questions like this on Decoder all the time, and there are usually answers, even from some of the most powerful executives in the world. In fact, especially from some of the most powerful executives in the world. But here, well, you’re just going to hear Chopra say, over and over again, that he doesn’t know. Sincerely, I don’t think he knows — and that should probably be as worrying as anything.

He and I also talked about the clash between the two main factions of the Trump coalition. On one hand, there are the Musk tech libertarians, and then there’s the more populist MAGA wing. Right now, these two factions are having a big fight over tariffs (and it’s still hard to tell what’s going on there), and they seem poised to be potentially even more at odds as Trump reshapes more of the government.

The CFPB sits right in the middle of that fight; it’s a lot easier for Musk to turn X into an everything app crossed with a crypto payments platform if there’s no regulator on the beat. But the populist wing of the party isn’t exactly in love with big banks and Big Tech gaining even more power. I have no idea how that will play out, so I was curious to see if Chopra had any insight — and what he was most worried about happening without an agency like the CFPB standing guard.

Okay, former CFPB head Rohit Chopra. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rohit Chopra, you are the third director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You’re a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

Briefly explain to people what the CFPB was meant to do.

Yeah, well, we saw many people lose wealth across the country after a massive mortgage crash, and there was a realization that there was really no one kicking the tires on some of these very big financial firms that were offering loans that were set up to fail. So they created an agency with some real teeth to go after the biggest financial companies, but others too, who were peddling loans, payments, and other financial products.

Do you think that establishing all this oversight was a better solution than simply letting a bunch of people fail at their big businesses?

Look, this is not a true capitalist system. When you had some of the biggest companies in the economy at the time, the big Wall Street banks, screw up, and then many of them actually grew bigger and more powerful on the other side. So it’s not an “either or.” It should have been an “and,” where there was tougher enforcement to look after consumers, but also really making sure that those bailouts could never happen again. There were not enough fixes, and I think we are still feeling the anger from those bailouts even today.

It seems like today, no one’s exactly sure what to do with their anger. And the government right now, you’ve got Trump’s faction that has a lot of popular, maybe even populist anger at big banks, big business and big tech, and then you’ve got Elon Musk who kind of wants to be an avatar of tech and business empowered to tear down all the parts of the government that can do anything about big business and big banks and all that. You were right at the center of that storm. How do you square those things?

Well, that was clearly two big factions and one of those factions won out. A lot of people were hoping on Wall Street that I’d be fired on day one, but I actually kept going for a few more weeks. In fact, Donald Trump went and gave a speech at Davos calling out Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, the CEOs of JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America.

But then not so long later, just a few weeks, we do see Elon Musk take decisive steps — and here’s what’s interesting — to fire the technologists and investigators at the CFPB very, very quickly. Of course, this is coming at a moment where the CFPB is needing to look more and more at tech giants because they are increasingly infiltrating payments and lending.

You got fired. Was that a phone call from Donald Trump? Was that a phone call from Elon Musk?

It’s a letter.

It’s a letter?

You get a letter, yeah.

How did the letter arrive? Was it USPS? Was it an email? Was it a PDF?

You get it electronically, though, I think they probably sent a hard copy too.

I’m always interested in these little details. Literally, did you open a PDF and say, “Well, that happened?”

Yeah, I think I read it and I was prepared for that moment. We had said very clearly, I’m not going to resign. I serve a five-year term, but if they want to replace me, that’s their right. And then I think they were in a war with each other whether they’re actually going to use this agency to go after abuses by big financial firms and big tech firms, or are they going to defund the police that look after Silicon Valley and Wall Street. They chose the latter.

When you say they, who specifically do you mean?

I don’t know, but at the end of the day, that’s what the White House decided.

Do you think Donald Trump made that decision?

I have no clue, but certainly, he’s the one that has to ultimately sign off on who leads these agencies.

I’m asking this very specifically because being fired from that role requires presidential authority.

That’s right.

You not knowing who made the decision to fire you, seems like a central part of the story here, and it seems like you are unwilling to assign that decision to Donald Trump individually.

No, I mean, look, that’s his call. It’s his signature on it. There’s no question that he fired me, but really who was in the room and who was pushing for what… I don’t know. I certainly see the signs that Elon Musk played an enormous role in that. Interestingly, it was just before Thanksgiving, a few weeks after the election, Elon Musk tweeted, “We need to delete the CFPB.” In late January, X inked a deal with Visa to become a new platform to move payments. A few days later, I was fired. I don’t know, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that there was a voice, not necessarily from Wall Street, but from the big tech companies and Elon Musk that was really calling the shots.

We’re already seeing a number of very fast decisions to overturn decisions you’ve made or policies that the CFPB had in place. The Senate just voted to overturn rules about overdraft fees for checking accounts. The CFPB itself has announced now that they won’t enforce payday lending rules. There’s all kinds of this stuff happening. We’re seeing companies that were previously penalized starting to light back up and advertise again.

And by the way, issuing a series of pardons including to Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and a long list of other companies. These were in courtrooms across the country, and those cases were pulled out without any explanation.

How do you think people should assess the risks of not having a regulator like the CFPB there right now?

Well, I feel we’re at a moment right now when everyone thinks that their data is being harvested; that there are more risks online to our privacy, to our identity; our voices and images about ourselves can be cloned. There really is so much that people are at risk for, and many people don’t feel they have any other options, and they’re just hoping that someone is looking after all this.

When I board a plane, I’m not going to read up on all of the history of the aircraft. I expect that there is a regulator making sure that that plane is not going to burst into flames. When I walk into a building and get in an elevator, I have to expect that someone has inspected it to make sure that elevator is not going to come crashing down and kill people. So people really want to see some meaningful inspection and oversight, especially when it comes to how much money is at stake.

You mentioned Elon Musk several times here. It seems like he is playing a central role in deciding who the regulators are and how the regulators will work. He’s wanted X to become the everything app, including for payments. I’m not sure that will ever happen, but that’s what he said he wanted. He obviously does lending with Tesla. He’s involved in a lot of things that access our payments infrastructure, that access to the financial system.

Do you think that his approach is strategic? Do you see a plan in the moves that Elon is making, or do you just see random destruction?

It could be both. There was lots of worry about when his folks got into the CFPB systems, who were they snooping on? Were they looking at some of the plans of their competitors? What were they downloading? Look, this is not unique to X. We have seen this in many other gigantic tech firms.

Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan and said, “Why is the CFPB looking at me? We’re doing social media,” not acknowledging the fact that a few years ago he tried to create a new currency and is increasingly into the world of financial products. Apple and Google, they are the ones that move so many payments when we tap our phones. So I do think there is a little bit of jealousy that some of these tech firms in the U.S. have over their Chinese counterparts.

Look at how Alipay and WeChat Pay have a window into every single consumer transaction, it seems like. It’s so ubiquitous. They are able to match that information with geolocation, with friends and contact lists, with search history and so much more. So it’s no surprise to me that there is a race to have all of the data about our payments and transactions because I think there’s going to be big money in that for them. We felt it was important to make sure that the existing laws, financial privacy, fraud, all of it were actually being enforced.

There’s the argument from Silicon Valley that I hear all the time that the regulations are actually too burdensome, that it prevents them from building all the things they want to do. Do you think we had the appropriate set of regulations that just needed to be enforced more consistently and with more transparency, or did we need more? Or did we need less?

In some cases, we need the laws and the rules to just have brighter lines — being very clear on “this is what you can and can’t do.” It is often true when the sausage is made and goes through the system, it can be complicated. But at the same time, these are laws and rules and when a small bank or a tiny tech company violates them, they feel like their whole business is on the line.

But when the biggest players violate those laws, sometimes with impunity, it feels like they just get a fine and move on. I think that was something that I really tried to correct — that we should focus on the biggest actors that are repeat offenders and to make sure that all the little players were not being choked off by some of the biggest gatekeepers and banks. I’m not saying we ever got it perfectly right, but we have to have laws and we have to enforce them.

That brings us to today with the CFPB. Obviously you have left, but there have been lawsuits related to the agency. The employees are theoretically supposed to be back at work. It’s unclear if they’re actually working. What is the current status of the CFPB?

There is lots and lots of money being completely wasted by putting all of the staff essentially on the bench. They are not continuing investigations. They are not distributing money that is supposed to be refunded to people. They are not doing those basic inspections of very large financial companies that the law specifically instructs them to do. Right now, there’s a lot of litigation about this. A court has put a pause on any further destruction to the CFPB, but of course the proof is going to be in the pudding. When are they actually going to enforce the law and do their job or are they just going to keep paying people to sit at home?

Do you think the courts are going to allow Trump and Musk to just dismantle an agency without an act of Congress?

The president can’t unilaterally repeal a law.

Do you think it’s possible to maintain the CFPB and its enforcement actions in the economy that Trump seems to envision? One where we’re doing tariffs on big partners and trying to move a lot of investment back to the United States, while at the same time we’re basically deregulating huge swaths of the rest of the economy.

I think that is a recipe for a mess. There’s greater signs right now that the country could be heading into a recession, and if there is a recession, that’s a time when we start seeing the auto repossessions, the mortgage foreclosures, the student loan defaults. That’s exactly when you need a CFPB because if you do not have any watchdog and you just have a lapdog, that will be a place where families across the country could just lose trillions and their lives could be turned upside down.

You can see that there’s a remarkable appetite for pain from this administration in particular. You hear the treasury Secretary, Scott Besant say, “The American dream is not cheap flat screens.” You heard Elon Musk on the campaign trail say, “There will be some temporary hardship.” You hear Donald Trump basically tell people to get over it.

Then there’s this stuff with DOGE in particular that seems related to that bigger goal, right? They’ve wanted deep access to the payment system. That was one of the very early controversies. They want lots of access to data. They’re insistent on getting access to Social Security in some way. How is that related to the work you were doing at the CFPB? Obviously they probably want that data as well. Do you see some larger design here that makes sense to you?

I don’t, and I don’t think there is anything really efficient about offering buyouts to employees. Most of the people taking them were the ones who were planning to retire or planning to leave anyway. I don’t think it’s really efficient to lay off the people who are prosecuting companies that are fleecing billions of dollars from the public. So this does feel like an effort to delete and destroy rather than make more efficient.

Why are they doing it? I don’t know. But we’re all going to pay the price. We might pay more for our loans, we might pay more in our financial life, but there’s going to be a lot of hidden ways that we pay more, especially when it comes to health and safety. The more that the skies are not being patrolled, the more that toys and food are not being inspected — that’s just going to have costs that you can’t easily quantify.

Do you think that there’s some specific reason they’re going after the Treasury systems and the Social Security systems?

I don’t. I have heard a wide range of theories, but the idea of having that level of insight into all payment transactions flowing from the government really makes people raise their eyebrows as to what that data is being used for and who it’s being handed to. It seems like there’s many instances where there are full admin privileges being given to employees to hunt through the data assets of key agencies.

Do you think DOGE has been successful in finding any waste, fraud, or abuse?

I’m sure. Look, this has been a constant thing. When I was leading this agency, there were places where we cut contracts. We eliminated a lot of the executive positions that my predecessor had created, and I’m sure there’s some [waste]. I just don’t know whether that’s really the true goal.

The CFPB’s work over the last decade kind of made a lot of invisible things visible. If I’m having a bad interaction with a bank, well there’s just one of me against a big bank. I’m probably not going to be able to even pick a fight, let alone win it. But if the bank is hurting a lot of people, then an agency like the CFPB can see all those complaints and be empowered to actually do something about it.

Another agency we see that kind of dynamic with is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). You were one of the democratic commissioners at the FTC during the first Trump administration, but I’d say the FTC has not really been as effective as it could have or should have been for most of the last 40 years. The Reagan administration really pushed it into a really hands-off position, and even Democratic administrations since then have not been as effective as they maybe should have been.

But Biden brought in Lina Khan as his FTC chair, and she got pretty well known for trying to make the FTC really aggressive, particularly against Big Tech. Now, in Trump’s second administration, he’s fired the two Democratic commissioners, presumably to make the agency more compliant with his own vision. That seems to be illegal, and they’re suing. That’s another episode. But the chair who replaced Lina Khan, Andrew Ferguson, also seems pretty aggressive when it comes to big tech and he’s following some of Khan’s policies. It’s kind of a tangled web. I’m wondering if you can unpack all of that.

I think what you’re seeing is two competing visions about what the economy should look like. There is a more populist version of that, which maybe has some support there from the new chair you mentioned. I don’t know. But we’ll see how it plays out in that Facebook case that goes to trial. We’ll see how it plays out in that Google case.

I remember voting out that Facebook case in 2020, but it was not done with much support from Republican commissioners. It was two Democrats. I was one of them and one Republican. So it has always been a little bit difficult to follow how this plays out, but that’s something I’m going to watch closely. I’m also going to closely watch big bank mergers. Are they going to keep allowing some of the worst anti-competitive practices and mergers, or are they going to stand up to it? The jury’s out right now.

I think everyone understands that they can’t fight Facebook alone. That posting the copypasta about, “I don’t give my copyright to Mark Zuckerberg,” on Instagram accomplishes approximately nothing. But if you look at a million people doing it, well that’s a million people who would like to renegotiate their terms of service with Meta. And that I think crosses party lines. That doesn’t feel polarized to me that people are sort of unhappy with the deal they’re getting from tech giants across the board, particularly when it comes to their content and how it’s used, and their data and how it’s used, whether or not they really understand the details of it. There’s a sense that more value is being taken away than being given back.

I think that’s right. Look, there are so many things that large powerful firms do knowing that maybe it will piss off a couple of customers and they’ll complain, but for the most part, they know human behavior will click through that contract or agree to the new terms and conditions. In some cases, we know that this is a business model. So many things, for example, have turned into subscriptions knowing that they’re just going to get more revenue because it’s annoying to cancel.

We found one bank charging a paper statement fee. It was a small fee, but they didn’t print the statement or mail the statement. It was just a way to see if they could get away with it. So I agree with you, it’s not really all that controversial, but this is the age we live in where there are a handful of firms that have so much power in the economy that we almost feel coerced into using them, and the only check on that is often working collectively to enforce the law through our agencies.

The timing of this conversation is pretty interesting. A few hours ago, Mark Zuckerberg was spotted walking into the White House, at the same time about an hour ago you were onstage with Steve Bannon at a Y Combinator conference, which seems pretty unlikely all around. I look at all that and it all feels very relationship-based. It doesn’t feel stable. It feels like the game is for everyone to cut deals and make friends. Zuck can go to the White House and offer to be useful to Trump if the White House can just make the FTC’s antitrust case go away.

But the Bannon wing of the MAGA movement wants Zuckerberg and everybody else out of the White House. Today, we literally had all these things happening at the same time. You and Steve Bannon talking about oligarchs when an oligarch was literally in the White House trying to curry favor. This just doesn’t feel sustainable. These things are going to have to come to a head. How do you see that playing out?

I don’t know. We have a lot in history we can look at. Recall that in the Nixon tapes, Nixon talked to his advisor once about making sure they opened up investigations against the big TV networks almost to have a sword of Damocles over their heads. The networks at some point decide all to air, I think this is right, Patricia Nixon’s White House wedding as an olive branch that we’re going to start giving you more favorable coverage. I think there is this question here about whether these tech companies are just going to bend and be able to direct information in ways that are friendly to politicians in power? I think that is really pretty scary and ultimately you can see the factions that are out there and clearly there will be a rumble over it.

There are different factions inside the Trump administration that seem to want different things, but although those factions aren’t necessarily aligned on their goals or how to get there, the things they’re doing all have equally destructive outcomes. The CFPB technically still exists, but as far as getting the work done, it’s dead in the water. You can say the same thing for a whole lot of other agencies and departments right now too, as DOGE gets hands-on access to more and more parts of the federal government and starts completely remaking it or just tearing it down.

Do any of these factions have a point? And for that matter, how do we tell who’s doing what? There’s an argument that this is good actually, that these institutions have become dormant, that they have not been aggressive enough, that they have not protected consumers, that we have lived through crisis after crisis in the financial industry and maybe burning them all down to start over is required. Do you see that? Do you see, “Okay, if I was going to clean sheet a bunch of these agencies, I actually need to get rid of this history?” Or do you think you can recover from the moment we’re in now?

This argument of clean sheeting it, no one would design the system the way we have it today. The real question is what’s their motive? When the CFPB was formed in 2010, they did delete an agency. They got rid of a failed agency. They stripped power from the Fed, the FTC, others, and put it at the CFPB. It was a pretty big reorg and it did lead to an agency getting dissolved. I don’t know if their goal here is to build something that works better. I think it could just be to destroy and defund the agencies that act as checks on this powerful set of firms. I think those firms like what they see.

I’m going to push you on this one more time. Who is ‘they’ in this telling?

Well, obviously it’s the president and the people who are advising him.

I’m curious if you think Trump has a specific vision for the United States government or if you think he has a loose collection of advisors who are at odds with each other, who are fighting out to a goal that is to destroy most of the government and Trump isn’t interested in the details.

He’s ultimately the one that is accountable and he has to own the decision of what is happening to the CFPB. He has to own the decision of what is happening to law enforcement across the country. So there probably are warring camps, but I do think that one of those camps has been winning out based on what we’ve been seeing.

And that camp is the Elon and DOGE camp?

That’s right.

Wisconsin just had that huge special election for its state Supreme Court. Elon famously dumped tens of millions of dollars into it trying to buy his preferred outcome, and then Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate, won by nine or 10 points. There’s been some reporting that her margin significantly outperformed any of the campaign’s internal polling, and it seems like Elon so visibly inserting himself into that race is a big part of why.

That’s a big turn on Elon, right? For years, we’ve covered him as though he has a fandom. He’s online, he’s got defenders and evangelists, people like cars and space. But right now with the broader public, he’s strikingly overwhelmingly unpopular. You’ve got protests showing up to Tesla dealerships every week. People are showing up in his own gaming live streams to heckle him. Who knows how long he will last?

Then next to that, the populist nativist wing of the Trump Coalition seems to have renewed cultural relevance. A lot of people think we shouldn’t spend money helping to distribute food or medicine around the world, that we should put America first. I look at that and I see a bunch of people asking for a big competent government, the government that provides healthcare and education. But to do that, you would still have to spend money on Americans and on protecting Americans’ interests.

The CFPB is an example of a regulator that has been broadly popular that does something every day Americans can see: it gets money back in the pockets of consumers by suing the big banks. So having Elon tear it down is inefficient, right? It’ll cost money in the end and it will result in actual harm to a lot of people in a lot of very visible ways. That seems to just cut across Republican politics. It puts those two sides in conflict. So how do you make that argument? How do you connect those dots?

No one seems to be able to follow it. Yesterday, the House of Representatives, every Republican except nine voted to hike overdraft fees in America. None of it feels really consistent with the idea that they’re actually going to be responsive to people who live paycheck to paycheck, to people who often have been overlooked. Time after time, the evidence is showing that the policy choices are undermining the vibrancy of the economy and are overwhelmingly supporting big business over small ones. So that’s what we have right now. But I hear you that there’s clearly a disconnect between what is happening and what some of the rhetoric has been.

I ask that as a follow-up to the “who do you mean by ‘they’” question because it does seem like in that case, you can identify the “they.” You can say, “This is Elon Musk and DOGE, this is a very tech oriented base of rich libertarian venture capitalists who want to tear down the economy, who love to say they’re doing first principles thinking, and they want to rebuild some new crypto economy.” Or whatever it is they want to do.

And then there’s the other side of it, which is, here are all the actual people who just want better government services and who thought the price of living would go down dramatically on day one. Do you sense, as you look at the government now, as you talk to the people you’re talking to, that the more populist wing will actually push back against this techno libertarian wing?

That’s really what a lot of us are wondering. I’m in the same camp as you wondering what will happen? Is this marriage between two different camps really going to last? And there’s obviously signs of strain already.

Maybe the clearest lens for looking at this conflict is the Meta case. This is the antitrust case that began in 2020 and it’s going to trial this month. I’ve been saying to our team that this is the antitrust case that is the most understandable for most people. Everyone knows what Facebook is, everyone knows what Instagram and WhatsApp are, and you can easily form opinions about whether a single company should own all of those things. At the same event where you appeared with Steve Bannon, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson went on stage and said, “Sure, he’d obey a ‘lawful order’ from the White House to drop that case if one came down,” although he also said he didn’t think that would happen.

Then right next to that, there’s the Justice Department’s big antitrust case against Apple, which is a little harder to understand. People might benefit from Apple’s closed ecosystem, and they might not understand that every time you tap a button to buy digital things on your phone, Apple gets a big cut, which is effectively a tax. That has become a big issue in Europe, which is heavily regulating Apple and what it can do with its stores. But it’s a little more muted in the United States, even though this case is coming up.

We saw Tim Cook donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. He was obviously sitting at the inauguration. He’s presumably trying to negotiate with Trump about tariffs and antitrust in the same way Mark Zuckerberg is. How do you think that case is going to go in the Trump administration?

It’s hard to say, but the facts are worrisome. I think people really want the digital world to be more like an open ecosystem like the World Wide Web was in the earliest days where no one really owned it. It was an open network. People could grab their real estate, sure, but they weren’t going to be able to easily cut people off.

But with mobile, we now have this power to really own the flow of money and information through control over the operating system or the device. I think that is something across the globe that is going to have to be addressed if we want to continue to have a really vibrant set of digital apps and services in our economy. For me, there’s no question: without the Microsoft antitrust action, there would not be Amazon, Facebook, Google, or others. But I don’t know how this will play out ultimately. But you’re right, it does raise the question, is there going to be some sort of giveaway or some sort of cheap settlement that makes the problems go away?

The other way you can look at it is that Apple is furious about the regulations it faces in the EU. Meta is furious about the fines it might be made to pay in the EU. You can see that the tech companies have tried to say to Trump, “We need you to go fight the EU on behalf of American companies.” That seems fine, abstractly.

It also seems like we’re ending up in a position where we have a bunch of national champions in various parts of the economy and that the American government needs to go fight for them on the world stage. That seems dangerous in a different way. Do you think that’s how it’s going to end up?

That’s what I’m worried about. I go back to those pardons that were issued at the CFPD. Who got them? How did they get them? Why were they given them? It does make me question whether we are drifting into a more European or more Chinese-style system where there’s a clique of companies that the government goes to bat for rather than looking for competition on the merits. I really thought that we created so much in telecommunications and digital across sectors of the economy because we really wanted to make sure that little players could emerge and unseat the big guys.

I think that really is a big question right now. Are those large incumbents going to get special favors and sweetheart deals? And if they do, I think that’s a really big problem. They’re already making noise that in order to compete with China on AI, that they essentially need special favoritism. I just think this is a recipe for moving our economy into one that is just not going to be growing and dynamic.

The interests of the big tech companies do not align even internally in the United States. So I don’t know how you can say to Apple, “We will go fight the European Union on payments rules in exchange for you building a factory here,” and then turn right around and say to Meta, “You still have to keep paying 30% on Apple’s platforms, which is a thing you hate doing.”

Mark Zuckerberg is out there loudly saying, “Apple’s rules prevent me from building the kinds of products I want to build, and they’re a check on the digital economy that we could have if only I, Mark Zuckerberg was allowed to build more stuff on iOS,” and that’s why he’s building headsets, right? He wants to escape Apple’s platforms and put the computer on your face, and I don’t know if that’s going to work.

But even that alone — Apple saying, “Go fight the European Union for us on payment rules, Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to eat it domestically” – does not seem tenable. Obviously you sat in the middle of these negotiations. All these companies were arguing with you very personally about a lot of these things. How did you see that misalignment play out?

I think they all might hate each other, sure. They are all jealous, in some cases, of each other’s monopolies, that each of them have moats over different pieces of our digital ecosystem. They all have slightly different aspirations. But when it comes down to it, they are all trying to fight agencies that are enforcing the law against them and they hire squadrons of lawyers and lobbyists. They hire the kids of politicians and they really flex a lot of muscle, and we saw that very clearly at the inauguration of who got VIP seating. So even if they’re at odds with each other, they’re probably still going to row in the same direction when it comes to being held accountable under U.S. law by these regulatory and enforcement agencies.

Do you see any of our agencies having the will or the desire to enforce law against the big tech companies right now?

Well, it’s going to require the courage and will of people to demand it. We really saw how when people were holding some of these agencies’ feet to the fire, they started actually acting. We’ll see if they actually go forward with some of these major cases. You know, the Microsoft case took, I think, decades. It required a lot of resolve and in some ways it was an imperfect result, but ultimately it had a lot of payoff. But I do not want to see pardons and cheap settlements, which there’s certainly a risk of that if there isn’t the will to fix some of this.

One of the things I see most of the big tech companies pushing towards is the idea that everyone will live in their own personalized economic bubble. You will open Instagram or TikTok, you’ll see AI-generated ads that are targeted specifically to you, and then you will pay individualized pricing because they will be able to calculate or at least guess at how much you might be willing to pay. It might be different from how much someone else is able to pay.

That seems, in terms of legibility, almost impossible to explain to people — that the internet that you experience, the commerce that you are partaking in, is totally different than the person sitting right next to you on the same train. That your phone is a totally different economic experience than their phone because you simply cannot see it. You have to see it at scale. That’s coming. You can already see it in different ways and on different platforms. Do you think there’s any role for the government to regulate that? Do you think there’s any mechanism for us to regulate that and at least make it legible to people?

Yeah, I think this use of personalized pricing has to really have some speed bumps around it. We’re essentially seeing the slow elimination of physical price tags that people have long been accustomed to, and every transaction is almost seeming more like negotiating at a car dealer, except you can’t really negotiate. The price is personalized and it’s based on a lot of information about us that we don’t even expect the seller to know.

We’ve all had the experience of feeling like ads are stalking us through the digital world. We search for something, then we see the ad on a totally different device. But I really think this is a big threat of broad-based individualized surveillance oriented pricing. This is part of the reason why we were so focused at the CFPB on protecting financial privacy and people’s payments information. We undertook a lot of investigation and research to understand how all of this payment information was being used by tech companies.

Do you think America just needs to touch the stove? We just need to burn it all down and get damaged and wake up and say, “Okay, these companies had too much power. We need to take it back.”

There will be moments. I think obviously the financial crisis, COVID, all of it, created the conditions for people to rethink and for people who were fed up to act. I don’t know what that moment will be, but certainly if there is another recession, if there is a mass doxxing of Americans, if there is some other emergency, this could lead people to actually demand change from those who cast votes and sign bills into law.

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