Inside the first Code Conference: tech's heavyweights go off-script

"The American dream, the entrepreneurship, the passion, all those things, the hope that I got, I’d like to pay back. It is a bet in my heart that I have to pay back," Masayoshi Son said before an audience gathered at the US Chamber of Commerce in March. "I think America deserves the No. 1 position… because America is the best role model."

You could almost hear America the Beautiful playing in the background while bald eagles majestically landed on Son’s shoulders, tears of patriotic pride running down their feathered faces.

Apple's iCloud and iTunes chief Eddy Cue says the products the company plans to show off later this year are the best he's seen in 25 years.

"Later this year, we've got the best product pipeline that I've seen in my 25 years at Apple," Cue said at the Code Conference, which is taking place this week in California. Cue appeared on stage with Jimmy Iovine, who cofounded Beats and is joining Apple as part of its purchase of the music software and hardware company.

Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine isn't a fan of Apple's iconic white earbuds. On stage at Code Conference minutes ago, Iovine had harsh words for the pack-ins, saying that Apple — the company he will soon work for — makes them simply "to make sure the machine [iPhone] works." But he wasn't done there. "You listen to Apocalypse Now, and the helicopter sounds like a mosquito," he added. Iovine thinks Beats has done better than Apple (and every other headphone manufacturer) in this department. "We turned an entire generation on to audio," he proudly proclaimed. Putting sound quality aside, Beats' sales numbers and the prevalence of red headphone cables on every street corner both suggest he's not wrong.

Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who also appeared on stage, almost seemed to agree with Iovine's take. "We make the best headphones that come in the box," he jokingly confessed. "When you want to make incredible sound, it costs more money." The white earbuds that accompanied iPods and early iPhones for years were admittedly terrible, but the company did improve things somewhat with the EarPods introduced alongside the iPhone 5 in 2012. It even showcased them with a dedicated video, complete with a grandiose Jony Ive voiceover. "Sound is so important to the way you experience an Apple product," the design chief said then. What was Ive most proud of? Their "rich, powerful bass." In other words, the exact same thing Beats headphones are known for.

Uber will eventually replace the people who drive its cars with cars that drive themselves, CEO Travis Kalanick said today at the Code Conference. A day after Google unveiled the prototype for its own driverless vehicle, Kalanick was visibly excited at the prospect of developing a fleet of driverless vehicles, which he said would make car ownership rare. "The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car — you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away."

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said today that it was "probably a mistake" for him to have worked on Google+ because he's "not a very social person." Speaking at Recode's Code Conference, Brin — who also called himself "kind of a weirdo" — acknowledged that he used Google+ to post pictures of his kids to his family, but suggested that any previous professional focus on the social network was misguided. "It was probably a mistake," he said, "for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."

Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, said his attention is now on his company's semi-secret skunkworks group, Google X. Google X is working on a range of projects, including a contact lens that measures glucose, in addition to augmented reality wearable device Google Glass. Brin used the Code Conference to announce the lab's latest creation: a self-driving car that navigates without a steering wheel.

Google today announced its own design for self-driving cars, which will drive people around without a steering wheel or pedals. It's the latest project from Google X, the company's skunkworks group headed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Microsoft's Skype will eventually be able to translate voice calls between people. In an on-stage demo at the Code conference today, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella showed off Skype Translator, an upcoming version of the service that is capable of translating voice conversation in "near real-time" using technology developed by the company's Skype and Translator teams. With it, you can talk in your native language to another user who speaks a different language, and Microsoft will translate it to the other person.

"Ever since we started to speak, we wanted to cross the language boundary," Nadella said before showing off a development version of the software, which will be out in beta later this year and possibly as a commercial product within the next two-and-a-half years. The feature may not come free, Nadella added, but is already good enough to work between English to German, with plans to get it working with a number of other languages.