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You enjoy it. This is perfect.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
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Well, you know about Ramp. You also know about Microsoft, who's making some waves because they jumped. They were on Truth Social scrolling as they do. Their comms department was probably like, 'What's going on?' No, of course they were talking to the Trump administration.
Have you ever scrolled through social, by the way?
It's like five ads for every one post.
And they're crazy. Crazy. The ads are like, 'Are you a real patriot? Yes or no.' And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next phase of the funnel. And then they'll just be like, 'Glad to hear it, Patriot. How about $200 donated?' You're like, 'Actually, 100.' And they're like, '200 it is.' And you're like, 'Okay, this is clear. I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons.'
Well, they have Truth Social. They have a Truth Social ETF now.
Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social ETF?
Invest in the Patriot Economy.
Oh, okay. Truth Social is really going, building everything.
Are they building nuclear power plants too now?
Well, we have a lot of great folks joining the show today. Let's get to the Linear lineup. It's the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. And we have...
Brian Chesky from Airbnb. It's Chesky Day. That's right. We have from Robinhood now, Aether Flocks. He's the founder and CEO of that company. Space data centers. Gabriel from Noise, Alfred from Listen Labs, and of course capping it off with Marc Benioff.
Is the lightning round somehow sound? We got Noise Labs and then Listen Labs. We need Signal. We need the founder of Signal on the show.
Moxie Marlinspike. Well, actually, Moxie is going to come on the show today.
He's got a... So, you got Noise on the show. We need Signal.
But he has a new focus LLM called Confer. We're going to get him on the show.
Awesome. Yeah. No, I'm a huge fan of Moxie Marlinspike. And I'm excited to hear that he's coming on the show.
Well, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stock, options, crypto, bonds, treasuries, and more with all amazing customer service. So, Microsoft. I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. And the key line in here is really just that he says he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't, quote, 'pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills.'
There's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025. The new technology came out, there was a lot of excitement in '23, '24. In '25 things got serious, the numbers got really big, the impacts got big, and the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up. And one of the challenges is the early AI-generated videos were pretty bad, and so people were like, 'These are bad, my power bill's going up, I don't like this.' Now this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting really good, right? So I think people might start saying, 'Hey, it's totally worth it. It's totally worth it.' Seeing those little... You saw those four cats on the boat. That was...
Pull it up, Tyler. We got to see that line. Find the four cats on the boat. We will get it at some point. I did see an AI video of people racing full 18-wheelers with the boxes in the back. You know how sometimes there will be real races with rigs.
See, I think most people would see this and say, 'Can we get some sound?'
There's no amount of power bill... That's pretty fun.
Okay, turn it off. Turn off the sound.
Yeah, it's worth it. Worth it every... clearly. Yeah. You see that and you're like, 'Yeah.'
I think most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that they're getting this content for free. They got to pay for it somehow. There's no free lunch, of course.
Yeah. The power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in '26. The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly. There were a number of just... it seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys and they're like, 'Yeah, we actually do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it and we just circle it around and we actually don't dump it out and waste it.' And so you're just like, 'Yeah, why would... that's over.' And then we're like, 'But what about the power?' Like, no, as soon as we use the power, the power's gone forever. We use the power to generate and then we need more power. So the power thing stuck around.
There were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up. The one-shotting stories were very harrowing and a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails when GPT psychosis... like that one felt real, but it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails. The whole time it seemed like, look, these labs are... as soon as they're made aware of this, they're going to put a reality checker in the flow. And so if you're 20 prompts deep, it'll just run an extra query and say, 'Does this seem crazy? Does this seem like two crazy people talking to each other? Okay, let's shut it down.' Like it was pretty simple. And you can solve it just in software. And when it's a product issue, you can solve it with a weekend hackathon. You can just lock in. It can be one cloud code prompt for all I know. You can make the change to the app.
And I actually noticed this: the Claude app has a pretty short context window, like chat length. Like if you're chatting with Claude and having it do... I wanted it to pull the market cap for every single one of our sponsors and I was a couple prompts deep and it was just like, 'You maxed out the context window. You got to start a new chat,' which is sort of annoying, but...
Over five trillion, let's go. We have some breaking news today. But TVPN sponsors have been having a good year. Obviously Google Gemini is a big piece of that, but we do have some very large companies supporting this show and we thank them for their support. We also thank the smaller companies that haven't raised a lot of money like Turbopuffer, Serverless Vector, and Fulltech Search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Hey, one day maybe it's a 10 trillion dollar company, maybe it's the entire market cap. I can see it.
So the power one was tricky because with power, you know, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers and then you just see demand is increasing. Supply is staying flat as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When demand increases and supply stays flat, we know what happens to prices. They increase. This is basic supply and demand. Yes, we can build nuclear power plants, but we had Scott Nolan from General Matter on the show yesterday. He's working extremely hard on this. He says, 'Hey, we're going to be online at the end of the decade.' End of decade.
There's a lot of amazing folks. We've had Doug Bernau from Radiant on the show. We've had Isaiah Taylor on the show. As aggressive as these founders are, they're trying to go critical this year. That just means, think of it as testing.
Exactly. It's still years away. And then solar panels. Solar panels we can deploy those, but that's still slow and that doesn't solve the base load power. What if you want to use a deep research report in the middle of the night or generate a cat video at 2 a.m. when the sun isn't shining? Of course, you can do it somewhere else, but it doesn't solve it. It's not a panacea. And so you got to build more power infrastructure. That takes time. And I don't think very many Americans care about what the supply dynamic of power in America will be in 2035 if just last month they saw their power bill go up by 20%. They're like, 'This is hitting my pocketbook today and I'm upset.'
So Bloomberg reported a 267% wholesale electricity price increase if you're near a data center. So basically if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way, although there's a huge amount of variation. And it's now... even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center buildout. So there's $64 billion...
Yeah. One thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers have very real reasons to push back, right? It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products, right? Like it doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's jobs that come.
I'm kind of... I feel like I'm missing out. I want one.
I want one. There's empty buildings.
We did joke about moving the show to Abilene. But yeah, it's a very real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built and suddenly you're going to be able to go watch.
Yeah. Like you could be a football fan, but even if you're an AI fan, you're like, 'I don't need it in my backyard.'
Yeah. You're just like, 'I already have all the products.' And that's the big thing. It's like power bill goes up. What do you get in return? Nothing.
A nice view. A nice view. If you're a data center appreciator.
Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition. They are the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
So $64 billion in data center projects are currently held up and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say we don't want this data center because prices are going up. Now there's a couple other reasons. Some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, 'Not in my backyard. I just don't want a big white square building.'
Yeah, maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should have some aesthetics. Put some windows on it. Token cathedral.
I don't know. I don't know how big... that feels like a less important one. But there's a lot of communities that care about the beauty of the community, the natural beauty of whatever they have, and the fact that it feels like homes. And it feels like, yes, there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there and I know the cashier and I go there and I walk in. The data center, you'll never go in. They don't do tours. There's no reason for you to go.
Walmart is employed and it's a product for the community.
Exactly. Exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly, at least it has a brand and you know, okay, well, I can get something there. It does something for me. Whereas this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know. My slop might be coming from somewhere else.
So interestingly, the anti-AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So pretty much just across the board a bipartisan issue. And you know, tech has obviously worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans more in recent history. But now they're facing...
Yeah. And I think it's easy for people in tech to say, 'Oh, you're just a... these are lit... it's blah blah blah.' But it's actually not that. What's the incentive?
Yeah. Especially because it's going to get built somewhere. It might as well not be in my neighborhood. It's the easiest NIMBY argument to make.
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So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. We're going to talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong actually. I think it's a very good move.
Now, to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the clean transition tariff where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers, and Amazon pays a surplus above electricity costs already. But Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement. Like it's a whole story in the Wall Street Journal and they've actually put a face to the program with Brad Smith, who's the president and the vice chair of Microsoft, giving quotes laying out a five-point plan. He talks about a number of environmental issues as well. He talks about water too, that they want to be net zero on the water that they use.
In fact, I think Microsoft... and that's such a... it's a lamp. It's a lamp. Yeah, it should be a lamp.
But it's still good to just say, 'Hey, you know, if that was a talking point that you were going to hit me with, we already got it sorted.' Also, Microsoft is planning to be, I think, completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050, they want to be so carbon negative that as a company since the dawn of Microsoft in the '70s, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire life cycle of the company, which is interesting.
So Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers. Now a true free marketer is probably against this. Why is one watt of electricity more expensive for one person or another? If I'm watching TikTok and you're building the next... and you're curing cancer on your laptop, why do you have to pay less than me? Why are we putting a value judgment on a particular use of a public good? Most public goods like the roads cost what they cost, whether you're driving an ambulance or whether you're driving...
Zack Meyer says, 'Would be cool to see a Microsoft Liquid Death collab for water that was used in a data center.'
Used water. Somehow I have no idea if the water that comes out of a data center is drinkable.
Well, of course, you can just filter it.
Filter it again and then it'll be good to go. The Liquid Death.
So the diehard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply and demand issues. Let prices rise and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally. But there are political realities and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things. Even if you're just going with natural gas, it takes time. There are backlogs. At a certain point, you buy all of the natural gas turbines and then you need to build more turbine factories. That's why Boom Supersonic is getting in the game. And at a certain point, you know, you have to build more factories to build more factories and it does get slow.
And then there's also a capex consideration because if you're a power company and you say, 'Oh, great, the rates are going up. There's a data center in my area. They're going to buy a ton of electricity. I got to bring a new power plant online. That's great.' And then you go to your team and you're like, 'Okay, we need to put up how much money and where's that money coming from? And we got to pay for... Yeah, we're going to finance it, but we still have to pay for a bunch in the front and it's going to hurt the interest payments on that. We're not going to be making money from this new power plant for a while. So we have to pay the interest. So we have to raise prices.' So then prices do go up even if they are responding as fast as they can.
So there's a few different dynamics there that basically Microsoft and the big tech companies I think will be saying, 'Hey, look, we want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up capacity, and so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully you can pass that revenue on into bringing up capacity.' So I think overall Brad Smith is playing the game on the field. And the good news is that it feels like Microsoft can afford this.
So some numbers: electricity represents 40% of data center opex, about 7.5 million annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers, and so energy is a significant line item. I think like three billion a year in electricity, something like that. That's very rough. Probably got to go to SemiAnalysis for the real number, but this is back of the envelope stuff. But again, three billion in energy cost for 245 billion in revenue, Microsoft's going to be okay. If they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio, they were talking about a billion dollars of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a major rethink on the company. But it is a big step towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of higher energy prices.
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No, I think it's super smart. I think it was inevitable. Trump needs this for the midterms. He's putting pressure on everyone, right? Credit card stuff, data center stuff. We'll see more of this. And yeah, being the first mover ultimately... only the first mover, the one that sort of says like, 'Hey, yeah, we're excited about this.'
Is the one that gets any credit, right? If everyone's doing this, they're not going to get credit for it.
Yeah, it's a weird sort of game theory dynamic where this will probably wind up landing like a small tax on all the hyperscalers or all data centers as a broad, uninforced... It won't be a true tax, but they will all be paying it because the political reality is necessitated. But the first mover gets the good press cycle, which is funny. It is from Truth Social to corporate concession. Like that is the era we are in.
Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You're in favor of data center subsidies, right? Like you want the data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable to have government-backed data centers...
I mean, I just think like this is kind of disappointing because it's telling me that if you imagine we have like a real free market, there should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply. And that's obviously not happening because energy prices would be going down. They're going up. So it's like this is telling me that in the future we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want, or at least on any kind of short-term scale.
Yeah. It does feel like the energy market as a whole is at least in the short term much more zero-sum than people thought. There's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But the pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want.
Which is why I was a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy and a lot of work being done across all different technologies unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not be unaffordable. Because people do want to scroll Instagram Reels and they want to watch AI slop and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone after watching four hours of Instagram Reels.
Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent $200 million at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property which will reportedly be used for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal. Seems like as part of that, TSMC will expand their operations in Arizona, which is very exciting. And they are basing their design for this off of Costco warehouses. Nick here, the render here is very sci-fi. I've seen renders of their facility in Taiwan. It looks beautiful. Seems like they're bringing some of that aesthetic to Arizona. Seems pretty cool.
This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. He says, 'This isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her farm by a data center company. 11.2 million total. This is what big tech is doing in Michigan.' So anyways, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan.
Yeah, I remember on the University of Michigan campus, there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like 'Stop the AI data center' or it was 'Stop the data center buildout.'
And that's when you knew you had to drop out.
I was like, all right, this place is not for me.
Oregon rejection. You got to go back, take the fight to them. Put up some posters that say 'Yes on data centers.' Put a data center in.
Subsidize the data centers.
Yeah. So just some context on that last exchange. Matthew Zeitlin at Heat Map says, I think this is shared as an example of big tech doing a bad thing, but I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6,200 per acre.
So they're paying over 10x the price.
Yeah. I mean, who knows? They could easily be paying a premium because of this land-specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. But I wouldn't be surprised if some land maxers are going out and just buying up... you know, why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes in?
I wonder how real this text message is because I get a lot of spam text messages for business financing. 'Oh, we'll invest in your company.' You just get like random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out random numbers just for price discovery, just to sort of aggregate some sort of metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out. Like if this person had said yes, what's the problem? My wife got a spam text today that just said, 'Babe, I dropped my phone and it broke.'
She immediately texted me and said, 'This isn't you.' Right.
Oh, interesting. Pretty an interesting kind of like loop to get somebody and to... I imagine, 'Send me $1,000 so I can get a new phone.'
Do you remember the text that Ben got? He was asking him if you want to get steaks.
Number spam. That was the best spam ever. It said, 'Let's get steak tonight.'
Let's get steak tonight. I mean, should have said yes.
Did you respond and just say, 'I'm in'?
No, I just posted it. I should have responded though.
Oh, missed an opportunity to make a new friend.
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In other news, the stock market is down. The Dow falls, weighed down by JP Morgan. Not good. Not good news. There was a rocky quarter for JP Morgan and it weighed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Headline prices rose 2.7% from a year earlier according to the CPI. This was in line with expectations and November's rate. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, also held at the prior month rate.
Now, overall, weren't things doing... wait, where did they say here? I don't have this. JP Morgan earnings: investment fees both fall off. JP Morgan reported that the bank's profit fell 7% in the fourth quarter, dragged down by a change from its deal to take over the Apple Card credit card program and a surprising slip in investment banking fees. The investment bankers are not making enough money. Still, the nation's biggest bank saw revenue increase for both the quarter and for the full year and was optimistic about the trajectory of the US economy and consumer.
From Jamie Dimon, he said, 'Consumers have money. There are still jobs even though it's weakened a little bit.' He said on a call with analysts. I saw a great Jamie Dimon hype reel on Instagram Reels the other day. It was fantastic.
In other news, there's more details about that Apple Card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through. We should pull this up. Behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs after two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time will see Goldman replaced by JP Morgan on Apple's credit card.
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So in early December, a long-delayed deal hung over a call between JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.
If you don't know David Solomon, you probably know him because...
DJ D-Soul. But he also runs a big bank called Goldman Sachs. Very cool.
Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program and its roughly $20 billion in balances, but the talks had stalled. Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations. 'You're moving too slow.'
JP Morgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, they've secured a discount on the balances. We talked about this where normally these balances trade at a premium because people expect them to be paid back with interest. But in this case, JP Morgan was going to get a discount, but they wanted more protection in case the loans grew worse, in case there were higher than expected defaults.
Goldman executives meanwhile didn't feel the need to bend much now that the Apple program was finally looking profitable. Some executives on both sides had started questioning whether to walk away. Dimon and Solomon got on a call on December 8th. According to people familiar with the matter, they discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon. People said just before the new year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week, confirming the Wall Street Journal's earlier report. A little patting on the back for the Wall Street Journal.
The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together. JP Morgan is adding the flashy program to its credit card lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion-dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances. Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card. Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses, a chapter it is hoping to forget.
Moving the Apple credit card was never going to be simple. Card programs this big aren't put up for sale often and few potential buyers exist. Apple is famously finicky about details and control, including with its credit card. Before launching the program in 2019, Goldman and Apple agreed to unusual terms that other banks balked at taking over. The interested executives were especially worried about higher than normal delinquencies and subprime exposure and wanted huge discounts to consider a deal.
Even still, almost nothing about the process of finding a bank to replace Goldman has been normal to begin with. Goldman began looking to exit from the contract with Apple only a few months after it had extended its partnership with the tech giant to the end of the decade. Apple and Goldman had discussions with larger and smaller credit card issuers: American Express, Capital One, Synchrony, Barclays, and Santander, as well as tiny fintechs. Apple even debated bringing in private credit firms to help a smaller card issuing entity take over. But it didn't go that way and they landed with JP Morgan. So very interesting.
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The Labelbox. Moving on. OpenAI is going to be running another Super Bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl. Why don't we...
We need to watch last year's ad, react to that, and see what we think will change. What will stay the same? What will they do?
The artificial intelligence company behind the popular ChatGPT tool is set to broadcast a 60-second commercial during NBC's broadcast.
All right, with sound. With sound.
Let's watch it with sound if we can. The ad is the latest component of OpenAI's expansive marketing offensive which began last year with its first Super Bowl commercial.
Okay. The production team is telling us unfortunately we do not have the technology to play sound on a video.
But if I remember the song correctly, it's like... like something like that.
Really? Is it a licensed song? Because you were thinking that they should license Creed's 'Can You Take Me Higher' for this next one. Right. That was what you thought.
And it's like, 'To a higher plan. You're on the free plan. Please upgrade to the $200 a month plan.' Oh, we got it. Let's go. We do have the technology. AGI is here.
Okay, so there's someone throwing a spear. We create fire. Then the wheel. Then the wheel with spokes. Then the horse. The horse wheel.
We created the horse and corn. We created corn. Maybe they should use a Korn song. 'Freak on a Leash.' That's the song they should license.
I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like it is a very well done piece. So they go inside the skeleton, build the 747, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV, news. That's us. They go to the moon. Somewhat equally important.
And then you start talking to the computer.
What do you want to create next? And then you get the blue chat dot.
So I love... I love this. Yeah. It was just not necessarily... I didn't need a Super Bowl ad for me.
Yeah. I need a Super Bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd, right? The people who are maybe on the fence about AI.
But yeah, as a technologist, it has the aesthetics of like, wow, this is the coolest tech company ever.
And this has the vibe of Apple. It has a lot of throwback stuff. It feels like high technology. It feels techy elite. It feels designed. It feels refined.
It's possible at the time they were like, 'Look, we're growing so quickly. We don't really need to run a Super Bowl ad.'
Let's just flex on everybody a little bit by running one.
I mean, there's a certain... But this year, I expect it to be much more pragmatic about what you can use it to do, exactly how they want the average American to think about ChatGPT.
Yes. Yes. Where it integrates into their life, right?
And so do you think it'll be one specific use case? Like there's been OpenAI videos about ChatGPT helping you cook dinner.
And I actually got an odd email from a friend all about how he loves cooking with friends and how food is this important thing, and then he was calling out the ChatGPT video on food, being like, 'I don't like this because it's taking away the one thing I like as a human.'
I actually had a funny... using an LLM for a pancake recipe last week and it completely... the pancakes really did not work. Like because it's basically taking the average of all pancakes.
And it just made the most like runny mid pancakes. Really bad.
I don't know. It'd be interesting. I wonder if they try to do anything on the... it's probably too early for the commerce side. You could see some of that, but maybe they want people to know commerce is coming. I could also see them trying to make it interactive somehow.
You could imagine like when... you know, maybe this... when is... no, no, but I was going to be like ask, like talk, like chat with... like tell ChatGPT you want to... I don't know.
Well, it could... like they could sort of launch like ChatGPT Sports or something where you know you're like the demo of what it's showing you is that if you have ChatGPT as your second screen during the Super Bowl, you're going to pull up more interesting stories about the players. You're going to pull up statistics.
You're going to be able to understand, add more context to your experience of Super Bowl watching. Even like oftentimes if I'm watching the Super Bowl, I'll see an ad and I'll, you know, go to Google and say, "Well, what are the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time?" And I'll wind up on some listicle. And ChatGPT, of course, can generate that type of stuff all the time. You could filter and say, "Show me the best Super Bowl ads from tech companies back in the dot-com boom. I want to know about those." And you can go anywhere. And that is the magic of ChatGPT. There's a whole bunch of other ways that they could try and contextualize it. They could try and be emotional, go with ChatGPT health.
I wonder if they'll do anything on the dis with the new Disney integration, like if they wanted to spark like another Studio Ghibli moment.
It's coming online. Originally they said some in January. So maybe the timing lines up. That would be really wild.
Yeah, you get Darth Vader in there or something or...
I mean there's a lot of characters to choose.
Characters. No, I was saying like try to use a Super Bowl ad to prompt people to make... go to ChatGPT, turn yourself... turn your Super Bowl party into a Disney themed thing. Yeah, that would be very good.
Yeah, surprise celebrity appearance or celebrity endorsement would be good. They've sort of shied away from...
Scarlett Johansson. Maybe they can bring her back in...
Reversal. Reversal and getting her back on the team would be fantastic. But I expect that this will be the AI Super Bowl.
You think there'll be even more ads?
So for context, tech companies across Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Perplexity collectively spent 333 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the United States just last year. And that was up 43% from the prior year according to estimates from an ad tracker, Sensor Tower. They also shelled out 426 million on digital ads in 2025, more than triple their 2024 outlays. So interesting. Digital is growing faster than linear. That's... I would not expect that. I would expect the digital to have been really popular and then them to have just jumped into linear. But I guess they've been...
Wait, are they talking about like streaming ads?
Maybe. It's from Sensor Tower. It just says digital ads, which I assume is Facebook, Google ads, all that sorts of stuff. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL, NBA, and college sports games with ads for its Claude chatbot. It shelled out an estimated 16.5 million dollars on linear TV ads in 2025.
Despite boasting a base of over 800 million weekly users, OpenAI is... and that is such a stale... people to download this app.
Like they really can't. I mean, they're not in the top 25 apps.
Oh. Oh, you're talking Claude. Sorry. That 800 million weekly active users is for OpenAI, for ChatGPT.
No, I know, but I know. So, they've been spending money all over.
Well, you know why Claude is not at the top of the app store charts? It's because if you generate a deep research report on the iOS app, it will not read it to you out loud. It doesn't have that functionality. And that's clearly a gap that everyone has experienced and recognizes, and as soon as they run into that, they uninstall it and they don't recommend it to their friends. So, if you're listening Anthropic, please add that functionality. I want to be able to listen to deep research reports.
I just think how do they figure out how to become a real player in consumer? Because clearly they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be spending that money.
I mean they need hooks. You need some viral flywheel. So the ChatGPT number, 800 million weekly active users, that feels woefully out of date. It feels like they were well over a billion and they're just waiting to actually drop that press release at a key moment and now is not the right time to wow everyone with the real usage numbers. But I definitely think that they're beyond that. This number is very stale. Like we got this 800 million weekly number months and months ago and it must have grown. Google obviously has a whole bunch of hooks into the Gemini ecosystem through Gmail and Google. There's so many different entry points. Claude as an independent app doesn't really have that. Also I think just on a product sense, ChatGPT, I do think that the holidays were successful and it was not discussed on X. The tech elite and anyone who's in tech was focused on Claude Code. They were doing vibe coding projects, they had time off from work and time to lock in and play around with the hottest new coding agent. So people weren't... People knew that ChatGPT could do images, but right before the holidays started, ChatGPT launched the image tab. And if you go to the image tab in the app, the most interesting thing there is that it's not just a prompt box. They have preloaded... Have you seen these? Like it will show you retro anime. It will show you ideas like turn yourself into a bobblehead, turn yourself into a sugar cookie or fisheye lens or ink work or pop art. And so it's taking the work out of someone. Like most people in tech, an image model comes out, Studio Ghibli thing happens, everyone's like, what's the prompt? Okay.
It's too much to ask people to have an idea. It is.
We need to give them the idea and we need to make the image for them.
It actually is too much. It actually...
And then eventually when you have your little sweet pea, whatever they're calling their new device...
It will just be generating images on the fly based on your day.
And then eventually you'll just be able to stay laying in bed all day long.
Yeah. But I mean just from a product perspective, the ChatGPT images tab is I think an important growth hack, which is something that they just have to do now because they're at that scale. And I saw that people were generating images and then sharing them and they weren't screenshotting them or downloading them with some watermark. They were clicking the share button in the ChatGPT app and sharing a link to the ChatGPT app that would show you the image in a preview if you shared it in iMessage or in a group chat. And that would onboard more people and those sorts of viral loops. They feel like, oh, the tech is so magical, it should just grow organically. But yeah, it already grew organically. The organic growth was a billion people. Now how do you get the next billion? Well, you probably have to do some growth hacking and a product like images in ChatGPT with Disney characters and links that beg you to install the app for yourself. And Claude isn't quite there yet where there's an obvious thing that a huge swath of people can go to and then hook in and we can collaborate and I send you a link and then you install.
Yeah. The tough thing is like if you're spending all this money trying to drive consumer downloads...
Yeah. But then you don't have image generation at all.
At what point, why don't they just... even if that's not a priority for them? Yeah. It still feels like a product that consumers really want. Yeah.
And so at some point they may have to capitulate.
I mean I don't know if they care about the consumer app race at all. It feels like Anthropic's been super focused on the enterprise, super focused on coding and that's been...
I know. I know. They say that like...
All I'm saying is you can say that you're not focused on consumer, but they run billboard ads all over LA.
They're spending a lot of money on television. Yeah.
And so you kind of need to make up your mind.
Yeah. You don't really advertise in NFL and NBA. I mean, I guess enterprise buyers watch those shows. So 16 million, maybe it's worth it. But I agree with you generally.
Their ad campaigns have been great.
Yeah, that's it. And maybe they just want to rub it in the face of the other labs. They're also going public. So they want...
Developing real name recognition broadly I think is important. But...
I mean, in theory, if they host Claude Code in a virtual machine that you can access from a phone and have it write software for you, it should be able to go and set up an API with an image generator and generate you images. And so you should be able to do that from the app. Like Claude Code, if I ask Claude Code to generate an image for me, it will figure out how to find an image generator, sign up for the API almost, or at least I will give it the API key and then it will be able to generate images for me. Correct.
Yeah, it would ask you to... you would have to go generate the API key and stuff.
Yeah, but that's actually... I'll try that right now.
Yeah. What happens if you just ask Claude Code to generate you a picture of four cats on a boat or something? Like how does it actually work through solving that? At some point it should prompt you to at least maybe make a decision about which image generator you want to use and at least ask for credit card information to pay for it. Maybe it goes to a free image generator. I don't know. But the Wall Street Journal continues and we will continue after telling you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise money, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Selling AI to the masses isn't easy, says the Wall Street Journal. Due to sustained public fear about the technology's potential downsides, businesses have already cut jobs using AI for tasks previously performed by humans and executives have articulated plans.
Why would the masses be scared? Why would they be scared of this technology?
Half of US adults are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence according to a spring survey by Pew Research. That's a while ago, but...
Only 10% say excitement outweighs their worry.
Skill issue. Just be in the 10%, right, Tyler?
Yeah. Well, OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between...
Wait, this would actually be a great bit. We should make an AI Tyler that we can go to and say... and we'll just compare the two of you guys and this can just be a good barometer for AI progress. How do you feel about that?
It could probably do a pretty good job because it can already do like a talking head if you just put an image of me and then the voice you can clone.
I know but I don't think it would have your takes. I don't think it would have your takes...
Just say like... or your... or dwarash or...
It would say, I'm sorry, that's too controversial. I can't hold that opinion.
Well, OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions such as the light bulb. More recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. They feature people using the chatbot for everyday problems such as finding a recipe or searching for exercise tips. Which way will OpenAI go in the new Super Bowl ad? I imagine that they will go more proactive, more productive, more tangible. There will be a human shot with a camera using the app probably on the phone.
But we'll see. In its ads, Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Yeah, why would you want to run an ad saying that? This strategy anchored by the...
This is a Super Bowl ad concept. We are not a threat to human intelligence.
We are not a threat in...
Yeah. How about a superis?
We hear you. We hear that you're concerned.
Yeah. Just saying this massive Super Bowl warranted. Our Pdoom is actually really low relative to the true risk. We think that the Pdoom should be low. Everyone's like, "What are they talking about?"
5% chance of annihilation by end of year.
Well, if you're running the Super Bowl, you got to get on Reream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. I want to be able to watch the Super Bowl on LinkedIn. If you want to multiream, go to reream.com. And I know the folks who have the rights to the Super Bowl...
SA really should push to get LinkedIn the streaming rights for sure. Be a game changer for the Super Bowl.
Okay. So Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today, designed for you. Personal intelligence they're calling it. Personal intelligence draws insights from across your Google apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below. They say, "Gemini already remembers your past chats to provide relevant responses. But today, we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of personal intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google Search, and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses. Here are some ways you can start using it." Planning. Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel because it'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been. It'll know that I went to Austria and recommend a different city, maybe. Shopping. Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level. Help you find items you love faster. Motivation. Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards. Look at your to-do list. Privacy is central to personal intelligence and how you connect other apps to Gemini. The new beta feature is off by default. You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at any time. Personal intelligence begins rolling out today as a beta to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. That's me. So, I got to turn this on. I'm very interested in seeing... I imagine that I will not be able to link multiple Google accounts because I have a personal Gmail and then I have a work Gmail and then I sort of want to integrate my old work Gmails that I think I have access to still because that says a lot about me even though I'm not really using that stuff anymore and I'm not actioning those emails. I could see that being important in terms of like building out a...
Yes, you were sick of constantly switching between calendars and Chrome and having your personal calendar, work calendar. Get ready to be sick of switching between LLMs.
Yeah. Some of them have been surprisingly good at bootstrapping knowledge. I feel like a few of the LLMs have surprised me by... I'll ask a question and it'll just be like, and here's the context for TVPN, here's the TVPN angle, and I'm like, "Oh, I forgot that I mentioned that to you" or like you figured that out somehow or like yeah, you did something. I don't know. The personalization is getting better. Maybe this is the year when it really hits. I know ChatGPT introduced it as a concept a while ago, maybe almost a full year ago. And it hasn't felt magical yet. Pulse was cool, but I never became like a daily active user of Pulse. The interesting question is like, yeah, is it a data source problem? Is it an architectural problem or is it an actual model level problem? Are the models just not smart enough? Do they not have enough data or are they not designed in the right way where they can actually go over all of your information? I was using the new Salesforce Slack bot that we're going to talk to Marc Benioff about at 2 PM and it was remarkably useful in Slack because I'm not on Slack a lot. And so I had a ton of notifications that had built up over months and I was able to go in and write a prompt or just talk to the Slack bot and say, "Hey, catch me up, what's been happening in this Slack workspace?" And it did a good job summarizing all the different key things where I was mentioned, what was relevant to me. I did probe it on what Anthropic model it's using exactly and it's not using the latest and greatest 4.5. It was using I think 3.5. It didn't seem aware of the latest models and also it didn't have the ability to search the web. It didn't have the ability to act as like a full-fledged LLM. You couldn't just ask it things. It was very confined to Slack, but within that domain, it was pretty useful and it did help me sort of get to inbox zero in just like a couple minutes because I was able to just scan a digest of everything that's happening across all the channels instead of clicking through them, scanning, reading the threads, going down the... it was just able to be like, here's the deep research report on it. Yeah, I am waiting for the moment where people are like, I'm not really interested in trying a new LLM that's hot because...
Like having memory in the LLM and personalization is so important. Like waiting for that lock-in moment. I don't think it's really... you have some forced lock-in where a company is saying like, we use this LLM...
Or vice versa where you know they're just... it's just like yeah, in the course of my day I use five different LLMs. Like on my phone I use Apple Intelligence and that's routing to Gemini and then I log into Slack and that's using the Anthropic APIs, but it doesn't really matter because I don't care that they don't talk to each other. Like it's all fine and they work, they're good enough for the particular thing that I'm trying to do at a particular time. That's another possible outcome here. Andrew Curran is summarizing some of the news here, saying that it includes Google Workspace. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into, you know, nano banana. You can have, you know, more suggested images. Hey, do you want to touch this photo up? Do you want to create some sort of holiday card? Like what ChatGPT ultimately wound up doing with...
Go through Google Photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every single set. The GPUs on fire for sure.
Before we move on, Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card.
New York Times has some coverage today talking about IPOs of this year. 2026 may be the year of the mega IPO. Not really new news for those of you listening. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic are going public. They talk about Eddie Malloy from Morgan Stanley says, "We're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented IPO deal sizes. We are confident they're executable given the scale of these companies and the investor interest. In two decades I haven't seen private companies that are this meaningful and are this impactful," said Jeremy Abson, an investor at Irving Investors. "Not only are they bigger and more relevant, but they're incredible companies with numbers that we've never seen before ever." I think everybody's excited to just get into these S-1s.
I expect them to be extremely impressive numbers.
There's been a number of reports about how bad the gross margins are, how much money they're losing. Well, we're about to find out the real details.
It's going to be exciting times. Exciting times. So yeah, we'll see. All the geopolitical chaos, even this ruling around tariffs, which we didn't get today, all this stuff is going to play into whether or not the window stays open.
Yeah. Console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Saks Fifth Avenue...
Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman filed for bankruptcy.
Crumbling Saks guy. You shop at Saks Fifth Avenue. Have you shopped at Saks Avenue?
I've never been a department store guy.
Department store guy ever.
You go straight to the Chrome Hearts store.
You're the guy in line outside Supreme.
And they don't sell Supreme, right?
Maybe that's why they're going bankrupt.
Zero Chrome. Anyways, they filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday. Crumbling under billions of dollars in debt, a fraying relationship with vendors and lagging sales. The filing is the latest sign that America's luxury department stores, once landmarks that served as immersive fantasy worlds for the wealthy and aspirational, are becoming an endangered species. Jeffrey Van Raamdonck, the former Neiman Marcus chief executive, will return as Saks Global CEO. He succeeds Richard Baker, the chief executive and executive chairman who in 2024 orchestrated a $2.7 billion acquisition by Saks of the Neiman Marcus Group which owns Bergdorf Goodman. Saks said it had secured roughly 1.75 billion to help finance the company through bankruptcy, much of it coming from its bondholders. Saks said it intended to emerge from bankruptcy later this year and it expected to honor all customer programs, make payments to vendors, and continue to pay employees. Saks has brought in additional executives to help steward the company, including Darcy Pennoyer, former president of Bergdorf Goodman as president and chief commercial officer. "This is a defining moment for Saks Global and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future." This is good messaging. Trump was messaging around the Supreme Court ruling. He said if they rule against us, we're screwed. I was like... thought that he just was like if they rule against the tariffs we're screwed.
We're cooked. We're chopped in. We're cooked. Ridiculous things.
Yeah, I mean...
I feel like these stores are if anything just nostalgic, right? It really feels like an end of an era. Essence obviously went bankrupt earlier this year. In that case too, founders are going to actually maintain control. So we'll see how they navigate through. But again, I just wonder, you know, as these stores shut down, like who can even fill these spaces? Like there's just not companies that want to come in and occupy a bunch of this real estate.
You got to get Rick Caruso in there. He's like the master of this. Like there is something that's a little bit more durable about the mall that you go to for... there's restaurants, there's a movie theater, there's a coffee shop, bookstore, escape room, probably laser tag, VR, maybe a sphere. But there's a few key stores that are anchor tenants, the Apple store, and there's electronics. And then there are a few. There's a Louis Vuitton store, a Coach store, Bottega store, and those brands want to own the entire real estate experience. I think more now. I'm not sure, but it seems like, you know, as much as we joke about like the Supreme store having lines out front, like there is a deliberate strategy to that. Like you control the full experience, not just a corner or a display table in a larger store. So these aggregator retail stores seem to be having a lot of trouble.
Yeah, it's not good. Well, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Larry Ellison is being profiled in Vulture for New York Magazine. It's a very long profile that we should read through. First we should debate this story that we almost got to from Reddit yesterday. Are there any real candy innovations right now? r/candy, which I didn't know existed. "Hey everyone, I'm curious to hear your perspective as candy lovers. Do you feel like there's any real innovation happening in candy right now? Are there any sweets, brands, or flavors that are new?" Someone's been reading Zero to One. The stagnation theory has come to the candy industry. We're seeing progress in the world of bits, less so in the world of sugars...
of candy. Yeah. Some people did make the good point that yes, there has been a phenomenal breakout success in the candy industry. Do you know what I'm talking about, Jordi?
There's one really big winner recently and it is Nerds Gummy Clusters. These Nerds Gummy Clusters. I don't know where this got buried in this. This went very viral, I guess. But Nerds was a brand of candy that had been around for a long time and was doing I think fine, sort of like stagnant revenue, and then they came up with this way to create like the... Have you ever had Nerds? Are you familiar with this?
Yeah. It's like this grainy sand texture or something. I don't know. It's like a bunch of little pellets and it's sort of like...
Are you mansplaining Nerds?
Yeah. Sort of like hard to wrap. I don't know. It's not that accessible. It's like you either dump it all in your mouth and then you just have a tunnel. It's not a great user experience. It's a little outdated.
I thought it was fantastic growing up.
Yeah. Yeah. So basically what they did with the Nerd rope, they cut it up into these little clusters. And this product has been selling fantastically well and has done very very well. And there were also some... yeah, there's a bunch of people chiming in in the comments. Peelers, gummy mangoes. There's a whole bunch of stuff. There were even some companies that did sugar-free candies that I think have done well. There's been a number of new startups. There really isn't like a David's Protein Bar type of breakout success in candy that I'm familiar with. Are you...
I love candy. I just assume that it all wants to kill me. Yeah.
Bring me the poison. What was your favorite candy growing up?
I don't know. That's a tough one. Maybe Starburst, Skittles, the classics.
Is there anything else? What?
Hot Tamales. Okay. Interesting.
Tyler, what candy do you...
I don't really like any kind.
Interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I pick up candy from time to time at the airport. Something.
Yeah. Yeah. If we're getting on a plane, I like to have some candy hanging around. But you know, the Nerds Gummy Clusters, I've had those on plane flights a few times. But good to see that the candy community is coming out in full force in support of candy innovation. Well...
I went and found this original post on r/candy. And what do they say? The post seems written by ChatGPT, m-dashes, all of it. And yeah, basically everybody's just nostalgia maxing.
What are they most nostalgic for? What do they like?
They're just saying they like the old school stuff. Willy Wonka candy.
Does a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup count as a candy or is that a chocolate?
I think of chocolate as a subcategory.
I don't like Halloween candy. I got to buy Halloween candy for Halloween.
Snickers came in there. Okay. Yeah. Snickers. Snickers counts. That's good. It's also an ingredient that you could use. Like you wouldn't say like a chocolate cake is candy. There's something about the size.
Producer Ben wants a protein Twix.
I wouldn't be surprised if that revitalizes the candy industry. Anyway, let's move on to this story about David Ellison. The sun king of Hollywood. Before we read through this, we'll tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So, with help from his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in history. One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie Flyboys had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. What? On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. "I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison," Devlin said. Devlin made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s. Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla. Wow, what a run. But he'd struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, had a college-aged son named David, who was not only trying to break into Hollywood, but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a film production company with an aerial name, Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million. And Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role alongside James Franco as a pilot named Eddie who can't shoot straight. Come on, Eddie. Can we try the climactic fight scene?
Yeah, let's find a David Ellison hyper rail or maybe just the trailer. And do you see the photo that Vulture chose for this is sort of a collage, a rendition of David Ellison, but you know, they put him in the Royal Oak right there in the photo. You love to see it. So, Devlin... let's watch the Flyboys trailer. I'd love to see this. I actually haven't seen this movie.
we had no idea what to expect. Franco...
Maybe this is the movie to watch this weekend.
except you wanted to learn to fly.
Gentlemen, you have bravely volunteered to preserve freedom.
We got to turn this into... I think that's David, right? Six weeks.
Guy sure knows how to make friends.
All his friends out there, huh?
This is your quarters. French, you sure put on a nice war.
Got any objection to move you could have made?
I heard it's good luck to rub your head. I wouldn't do that if I were you.
Sorry, fellas. This room is reserved for killers.
Killer going to war in two days. Worried about me?
The Germans are moving towards...
I definitely saw this movie as a kid because I just love playing.
There he is. We'll be back by lunch.
This is pretty sweet movie for about 2001.
Are they missing a zero? Seems like a $600 million movie.
I'm going to turn this into a cult classic for fans of enterprise databases. If you're a fan of hyperscale and data center buildout and data center construction like the rest of us, be watching.
You got to be a Flyboys guy. You got to get the original Flyboys merch. You got to get the DVD copies. You got to start collecting this stuff.
Okay. So Devlin, he thought...
Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn't all that stressed about the money. He had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race.
He was however concerned about his son, the actor in the hospital. Wait.
Big.
The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation. Doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm.
He was so upset about losing that he was hospitalized.
That's crazy. You think he's gonna lose Warner Brothers?
Maybe not. Maybe coming back and getting...
I think this is a guy you want.
Yeah, this is good. Okay.
He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money.
He was upset about letting his father down. Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him. Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison family's adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun Maverick...
and Mission Impossible series along with a number of largely forgettable movies.
Sick. Have you seen Top Gun Maverick?
It's good. It's not as iconic as the first one, but it is a great ride. What about Mission Impossible? There's like seven movies in the series. Have you seen any of them?
No. He was in other words a producer much like many others in town. Then last year David's father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood's legendary movie studios and a company more than 10 times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellisons set their sights on an even bigger prize, Warner Brothers. At 43, David is now the first millennial, let's give it up for the millennials, to control a major Hollywood studio. While running Skydance, he'd built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action-packed blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them. But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Brothers had revealed an empire building streak in line with his father, who is currently the fifth wealthiest person in the world.
It's possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years in the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth 18 billion and couldn't afford Paramount which was valued at 22 billion. By last year, the 6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent...
which briefly peaked in his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to 400 billion. Yeah.
Oracle, Larry's company, is the world's most boring tech giant. Disagree. Disagree. It's one of the most exciting to me. Tell that to Chase Lock Miller Crusoe. Okay, we'll see who's boring then.
Yeah, we'll see how boring Oracle is when we talk about Abilene, Texas. Go to Abilene, Texas, and tell me that Oracle's boring.
Come on. Who's writing this? Who's writing this?
Larry had long harbored more globe-spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal Titanic Octopus. What?
Today, he keeps some of his wealth, which includes 98% of a Hawaiian island, in an entity called Octopus Holdings LP. In the past year, Oracle has become central to the AI boom, providing backend computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build LLMs. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI-infused revenue...
Its stock shot up so much that Larry's net worth increased by 89 billion in a single day. That still was such a...
moment. 15 Paramounts. Basically, you get 15 Paramounts in one day and you're like, "Okay, yeah, I'll take 10% of the gain from this day and buy a movie studio."
Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that combined with David's ownership of one and perhaps two major studios as well as one and perhaps two major news networks, Paramount owns CBS and Warner owned CNN, has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the...
What the Ellisons want with their conglomerate individually and together will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens. And the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis. Larry divorced David's mother when he was young and the two became close only as David grew older and especially once he got into business. David has always struck many people as his father's...
opposite. Shy and competent, not a bombastic, world-conquering visionary. David's ambition was initially as humble as making movies he likes. But the current climate has thrown him together with his father and shown him a path to something greater, if he can pull it off. Here I'll continue, but first I'll tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely, connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
So last month, the Warner board spurned the Ellisons' and Paramount's offer and agreed to sell its movie and TV studio to the HBO Max service to Netflix, creating a potential streaming colossus. The true streaming octopus is forming under Netflix's reign. The Ellisons have continued to argue that their offer for all of Warner Brothers, including its cable networks, is superior. They are currently attempting a hostile takeover and trying to persuade Warner Brothers shareholders to accept Paramount's offer instead. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Glad to be in the media business covering this because it's certainly entertaining. Of course, thanks to Dylan Byers over at Puck for putting this on my radar by posting it on X.
The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Some observers believe that acquiring Warner Brothers is in fact critical to Paramount's survival. Either way, now that he has made his move to become one of the industry's leading moguls, David Ellison is faced with proving to a skeptical Hollywood that he's up to the task. David's mentors are Steve Jobs and David Geffen, and obviously his dad. Those guys are ruthless killers, single-minded people with a different DNA. A former Skydance employee who worked closely with David said on the record, a former Skydance employee said, "David is a smart dude who is reasonably shrewd, but he's not that. He's not the ruthless killer. He's not the Steve Jobs, the David Geffen. He's something else entirely." During the Warner Brothers auction, the company gave code names to each of its suitors. These are the code names. Netflix was Noble. Comcast was Charm. Paramount was given the name Prince. Interesting.
One of the reasons David Ellison loves blockbuster movies is the way in which a spectacle can contain a more intimate story. How a battle for intergalactic peace or control of an empire can really be a story about a family. He has often described the formative experience of seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a child. The fate of humanity was at stake. But what David remembers is Arnold Schwarzenegger rampaging across the screen to protect a young boy who never knew his father. It's emotional. It's a great movie. Terminator 2. Have you seen it?
Brutal. It's like one of the greatest movies.
So good. It's... Is that what I should add? You should. You should. And truthfully, you can watch Terminator 2 without watching Terminator 1. They have very different vibes, very different pacings. You should watch both, but Terminator 2 is just a fantastic movie. It's so, so good. And there's iconic like memes and GIFs that I feel like you should know. "I'll be back," you know.
Okay, so some of the chat actually put together a film list for me.
Thank you. Interstellar, Heat, Inception, Shawshank, Steve Jobs, American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook, Almost Famous, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Sting. The issue is these are so, so many movies, you could easily be messing with me and just sprinkle in like 10 that are just like really bad movies. I'm like, well, the boys said I had to watch...
I think that's notoriously one of the worst movies.
There's a lot here. Here's three pages of movies. So I promise I will do my best to watch all these. It may take me multiple decades at my current pace, but I'll work down the list.
Well, so at the end of Terminator 2, David Ellison sitting in the theater, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to spoil the story, but Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in a vat of molten steel in front of the boy, and the 8-year-old David Ellison starts to cry. Wow. Larry wasn't around much when David was a kid, one of the only similarities in their very different childhoods. Larry was born in New York City in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who gave him up for adoption at 9 months old. His adopted father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who took his last name at Ellis Island. And a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Louis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything. Wow, what a crazy thing. Why did you adopt this nine-month-old kid just to dunk on him? This is so, so bad. But clearly it lit a fire in Larry, and he went on to build one of the greatest tech companies in history. Maybe Larry should write a book called Hardcore Parenting. You know, people talk about soft parenting, right? But hardcore parenting, it's like wake up every morning, tell your children you'll never amount to anything.
Crazy. As a result, Larry likes to say that he had all the disadvantages necessary for success. And colleagues at Oracle got the sense that Larry's seemingly endless ambition came partly from a desire to prove himself to his adopted father. "I'm not sure I would recommend that everyone raise their children like this," Larry later said, "but it certainly worked." Wow, that's crazy. David's mother, Barbara Boothe, was Oracle's 10th employee. He hired his mom when he needed a 10th employee. And Larry's third wife, oh, David's mother, sorry. Larry hired David's mother, Barbara Boothe. They divorced shortly after David's third birthday and right after his sister Megan was born. When Larry and his first wife tried couples counseling to save their marriage, Larry told the therapist that the very idea of love eluded him. "I don't understand love. I don't understand people bonding to one another. What is it?" Larry said he spent obligatory weekends with the kids and seemed to only realize later that a family was something he wanted. One night,
Guy doesn't understand love, but has been on his fifth marriage or something. He's like, I just need to get my reps in marriage.
Larry called Boothe to say he was lonely. "You're never alone because you have the kids. You always have a body," Larry said. "I'm here all by myself." David credits his love of movies to his mother. The family had a collection of 3,000 VHS tapes. And David's ideal day as a child was to watch the Star Wars trilogy or all the Rocky movies back to back. I did the exact same thing when I was a kid. It was fantastic. I had the Star Wars trilogy on VHS, it was one of my prized possessions. Quickly, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. It wasn't until David became a teenager that he and Larry started taking flying lessons together, that they grew close, eventually staging mock dogfights over the Pacific.
These guys are dogfighting each other. This is insane.
