Join us now on a great day to have him to talk markets on his big bet on the AI landscape. Famed investor Philippe Laffont, founder and portfolio manager of Coatue, a tech hedge fund with $90 billion in assets under management. You're very young to be this incredibly accomplished and wise and everything else. MIT, right?
I'm not sure about the wise. That's the only thing, Jim.
You're pretty darn wise. But it's great to have you, especially on a day like this for an extended interview. I guess maybe the first thing I'd ask you before we get into the details of today is we saw Elon the other day talk about the size of the global economy in 10 years. An unbelievable number. You have been early, I think, in identifying just how powerful this transformation is. I think last time you were on, wasn't that long ago, were you at $55 billion or so? Now $90 billion. Things are moving in your way.
You know, when you're at the center of everything, it's actually I'm more nervous now than I'm on the edge. I don't like being in the center of everything. But I think that AI really has the chance of being this really big wave. As I think about the economy long-term, you had the industrial age, maybe a couple hundred years, then the information age, maybe the last 40-50 years, and now we have the intelligence age. It feels like this is really a big trend. In the past, we got gas utility, water, electricity, transportation, broadband. Now intelligence is going to become this utility. For $50 or $100 a month, you just get hooked up to this intelligence network. The world is moving very quickly. To your question, is the world going to grow faster because there's that much more intelligence? Even if it grows 1% or 1.5% a year, over 10 or 20 years, the numbers can get big, and that's probably what Elon is referring to.
But you were early. Looking at some of your varied investments, when did you start with GE Vernova? When did you make your first purchase?
I think when I look back at what I've done, I started in 2000.
Late '99. Obviously, pretty bad timing. But I only come up with about five good ideas in the last 30 years. People say, 'How many good ideas do you come up with?' Probably had five. I came up with the internet stocks a while ago.
And then we came up with the mobile internet and Apple. When I got to Apple, it was like this onion, and you just peeled the onion, and all these ideas fall off. Just the one big idea: people want to have the internet in their pocket. Now with AI, you can pick one idea: AI's going to be big. But then it's like, these brains, these GPUs, they need a house, a data center; they need food, electricity; they need cooling like humans would. As a tech investor, it's important to go deep and unwrap all the different layers. Energy now is obvious, but maybe a year or two ago, people didn't think how much energy we would need to run all these GPUs.
You even buy land where the data centers need to be. How do you figure out where they're going to put the data center?
If you go back upstream all the way to the beginning, you think, 'Okay, I need the GPUs. The GPUs need to be connected. We need data centers. We need turbines. And then we need land. Part of land is we also need the electricity. Then we need the regulators, the approvals, the zoning. There's a lot of pushback now around 'not in my backyard.' It feels like potentially we'll need 100 gigawatts or more of power over the next X number of years. It'll be interesting to see how much gets approved on Earth, and will any of that also go in space?
Are you ready to jump on that bandwagon too when it seems feasible? You have SpaceX already.
We own some SpaceX. The company came out with a $1.5 or $2 trillion valuation. Obviously very big. The part to think about is why so many people think it's that valuable. Sometimes it's easy to say, 'This is clearly overvalued, we're in a bubble.' But what is it that people wagering their own dollars see in the $2 trillion? For me, what's interesting in space is that every economic gig code that happens here—mining, tourism, telecom, data centers, real estate—is going to move to space. It feels like a really big idea. I don't know if SpaceX is worth X or Y today, but in 10 or 15 years, is space going to be a really big idea? I would say with fairly high certainty, yes.
Can I ask you, you owned Cursor. SpaceX just made a $60 billion bid for Cursor in stock. Are you going to keep SpaceX shares or would you cash out?
I'm going to keep them. First of all, once we get the shares, we have to keep them for 6 months anyway, so we're locked up. After that, the decision is more of a portfolio decision: how much do we own of SpaceX as a percentage of everything? Different people rebalance in different ways. We own a significant amount of SpaceX, but relative to everything else, it's not as big for us. Some of the biggest mistakes I've made are optimizing for the short run, which turns out to be a bad decision over the long run. I'm trying to think about SpaceX in that lens.
When did you do Cursor? Did you know Michael? He was the only investor at the very beginning. He said he knew two guys, they were smart, and he didn't even know what they were going to do.
Yeah, he was an MIT undergrad too, just started the business. The bet on Cursor is there are two or three really big models: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Let's call those the big three. Then the question is, is there space for a fourth or fifth? Grok is there. Cursor was an interesting business. When you invest in these private companies, you need a little bit of faith: can this become a fourth or fifth model? I think Grok was falling a little bit behind and thought bringing the Cursor team would be helpful.
You sold a lot of Tesla, right? You sold a lot of Nvidia. Almost all of it.
When I was referring a minute ago to optimizing for the short run, you're rubbing it in my face. That was one of the bigger mistakes I've made, selling it. Sometimes you're like, 'Look, I've made so much money in this stock, maybe I should...' We started looking at Nvidia when the stock was probably $20, so it's been maybe a 10x over the last period. Sometimes you think, 'Oh, I'm so clever, I can sell out of this and buy that.' It rarely works.
So you're disappointed that you... Did you buy back in?
Yes, I knew you were going to ask that. I should have said something else. I would say that yes, it's a great company. The only issue with Nvidia is there are now other people making similar chips. They're not as good.
He's crazy like a fox. He's got a good reason for not having it right now, I think. You just don't want to say that.
