I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place 3000.
Double.
Right.
Misinformation.
Clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come, get up.
Trust the experts here.
Five.
We are.
Founder Mal.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
By.
Wrong.
Cup is.
W.
Team deathmatch.
We are expert.
Triple blades.
That's just wrong.
Right.
Clearing order inbound.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike one.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Marky clearing order inbound.
Five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby.
Founder.
You're watching TBPN.
Today is Thursday, March 5th, 2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the template of technology, the book for the capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
We are sick. John and I are both very sick.
Sick of not podcasting. Let's go. We are actually very sick.
Deathly ill.
That's the beauty of watching live. There's no risk of me getting you sick because you're on the other side of a screen.
Screen time unlock.
That's the beauty of a daily show. There's no โ you don't ever have sick days.
Yeah, there's no days off.
Because there's no days off.
And we have a fantastic lineup today. We have Mark Gurman joining. Let's pull up the Linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. We have Dan Primack coming on from Axios to break down the IPO market. What's going on in venture capital? What's going on with venture capital returns? Do we have Zach from Plaid coming on today? That'd be awesome. If so, we have Cameron McCord from Nominal, massive unicorn round that just happened with Founders Fund coming on in person live.
Max and Christian, vast space.
Well, thank you so much for tuning in today. Speaking of Plaid, Plaid powers the apps used to spend, save, borrow, and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Hey, John, why is no one talking about Daniel Gross? Daniel, no one โ literally no one. Gross. He should be a household name. You should get into a taxi and they should be, 'Oh, did you see how incredibly dialed Daniel Gross's AGI trades were in January 2024?'
2024.
Yes. This is a great, great website. It's โ what is it? annualgrowth.com/agi-trades. The classic Times New Roman serif font, 12 point, just hammering it out in the vanilla HTML. No need for styles, no need for Bootstrap templates. What's that CSS? Tailwind? He doesn't need Tailwind for this. He just wrote it and probably marked down our HTML directly. And a lot of it has come true. It's interesting because a lot of them are framed as just like open-ended questions, but if you think about โ you know, if you believe in AGI and then you go through the questions, like you will see exactly what happened over the last two years. And this has been the underpinning thesis of situational awareness in many ways. Daniel Gross was an anchor of the fund. That, of course, is โ
And it's particularly relevant today because I'll read the intro. This is January 14th, 2024, over two years ago. He says, 'I think we can all agree that GPT-4 completes many tasks at human-level proficiency. It is imperfect in odd ways. It can write software like a smart MIT undergrad, but can't do basic task planning like an entry-level EA. It speaks all languages, but can barely do math. Suppose the progress doesn't stop. Just like GPT-4 was better than 3, GPT-5 is capable of basic agentic behavior, i.e., able to accept a task, work on it for a while, and return results.' Nailed it. And of course today OpenAI has released GPT-5.4, which does exactly this quite well. Yeah, the reviews are coming in. Yep.
And they are quite, quite good.
Daniel continues, 'Some modest fraction of Upwork tasks can now be done with a handful of electrons. Suppose everyone has an agent like this they can hire. Suppose everyone has 1,000 agents like this they can hire. What does one do in a world like this?' So,
So let's go through them one by one. There's 17, 18 questions, something like that. First, let me tell you about Labelbox: reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So he kicks it off with an easy question: In a post-AGI world, where does the value accrue? People were debating this at the time โ application layer versus foundation model layer versus infrastructure layer. Value has definitely accrued to the โ
Infrastructure layer. I mean, you're even post-AGI. John's new haircut is paying off.
Paul Graham wrote a whole piece about how brands are important. We'll cover that tomorrow. But he compares it to the quartz crisis in the watch world and has a bunch of thoughts about value in the post-AGI era. But just looking back in the last two years, value has clearly accrued to the infrastructure layer. So that means chips, packaging, power, etc. And this is the situational awareness trade by and large. Nvidia basically captured โ and did for a while โ more than 100% of the profits from the AI boom because so many of the other companies in the AI space were losing money. And so the foundation labs are losing money. Nvidia's profit margin went from like 30% to 60% gross margins, and it was borne out in market cap. So Nvidia added $3.2 trillion in market cap from when Daniel wrote this piece. And I remember listening to him on Stratechery talk to Ben Thompson alongside Nat Friedman and say, 'Yeah, based on ChatGPT, Nvidia seems sort of undervalued.' And I was like, 'Oh, well, if they're saying it on Ben Thompson's Stratechery podcast, it's obviously priced in. Everyone knows this.'
And I was wildly wrong. Never doubt yourself. But what's interesting is that the rest of the platforms did not see, you know, 3x gains. They did not add three trillion dollars in value. Microsoft from January 2024 to today is only up 4%. Amazon's up 30%. And then you do have OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI in the private markets. The gains there โ they've been huge and staggering, and it's like the fastest-growing companies in private markets history, shaking the venture capital world. You're either in or you're out. It's a huge deal. But you add them all up: 14 trillion.
So crazy when you think Satya in many ways went on such a generational run โ
And you got a 4%.
If you hadn't looked at the stock price at all, you would think, 'Oh, it's got to be up what, 40%?' No, it's up 4%.
And so that was Daniel Gross's next question: What happens to Nvidia and Microsoft? These are the two interesting players at the time โ some of the biggest companies, the most AI-aligned. Nvidia absolutely crushed. Revenue tripled from $60 billion in fiscal year 2024 to $215.9 billion in fiscal year 2026. Microsoft has been far less dominant. So Azure growth actually is accelerating โ it's at 40% year-over-year โ but the stock only returned 4%, as we said. The market punished the $80 billion in AI capex that Satya Nadella has been telling investors about because everyone's asking, 'Well, I could be in Nvidia, and they don't need to really invest that much because they're a fabulous semiconductor design company. Their gross margins are increasing. They're printing cash.' And you are saying, 'Okay, you got to spend $80 billion, and we don't know when we're going to get the profits from that.' So there's an open question there. So when it comes to the picks-and-shovels trade, you don't want to tie yourself up to an individual startup or a foundation model lab. You just want to own the simplest thing that value will accrue to. Nvidia all the way. They were the clear winner of the picks-and-shovels trade. Microsoft's infrastructure play โ I think it's a good decision. It's just the bets have yet to pay off for shareholders. A much more pointed question: Daniel Gross asked, 'Is copper mispriced? Was copper mispriced in January of 2024?' The answer was, 'Oh, yeah, majorly.' Now, raw materials don't move like meme stocks. So the actual move: copper was $3.75 a pound in January of 2024. Two years later, it went to an all-time high of $6.61 a pound. So it's not like it even doubled, but that type of move in a basic material that we've been mining for hundreds of years is remarkable. And that's because AI uses a lot of copper. Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 server rack uses over 5,000 copper cables. There's 72 GPUs wired together, but you need 5,000 copper wires to get it all to work together. If you stretched out all of the copper wire in an NVL72 from one side to another, it would go two miles long. And this is one server rack. Like this is not going across the data center. This is not taking the data from AWS East to California. This is within that one server. You stretch out the copper wire, you're going two miles. It's an incredible amount. A single 100-megawatt data center, which is a data center for ants by modern standards, needs around 3,000 tons of copper. I think that's like a half a million dollars or something like that when you multiply it all out. Or no โ data centers broadly will be using half a million tons of copper annually in a few years. And people are actually saying that copper is the new oil. But there are a bunch of things that are also the new oil in the AI buildout. So it's so complex. There's bottlenecks everywhere. So you got to take that with a grain of salt. But copper was certainly โ
Looking like oil is the new oil.
Is the new oil. What is crude โ
For โ 80.
80. So it was at 70 before the Iran war broke out. There were predictions that it would go to above 100. Oil is another commodity that does not move in the same fashion as a meme stock or a โ
Except for today.
Except for today. Big move today, but typically as prices go up, the firms drill more and the prices reach equilibrium. US drillers aren't rushing to increase oil production. It's on the front of the Wall Street Journal business section today. The Middle East is on the cusp of a prolonged conflict that could push oil prices to heights not seen in four years. For now, American oil drillers are sitting this one out. The US oil benchmark settled at $74.66 a barrel Wednesday, the highest front-month settlement since the 12-day exchange of Israeli, Iranian, and American strikes last June. But to West Texas oilmen, it makes little sense to add expensive rigs and boost production when the war could be short-lived and crude prices drop. So that's what's happening in the oil markets. Anyway, moving over to real estate,
Daniel Gross asked, 'Is San Francisco the new Detroit?' And I'm not exactly sure what he means by new Detroit โ because new Detroit meaning like the old Detroit when it was Motor City and they were building amazing cars there, or the new Detroit in the sense of like Detroit today is a hollowed-out shell of what it used to be, a former boom town. The one thing that's clear is that SF is back. SF is completely booming. Office vacancy fell from 36.9% to 33.5%. OpenAI has a million square feet of offices. Anthropic has a 25-story tower. Sierra, an application-layer company, signed 300,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco. The Bay Area received 78% of AI venture capital in the first half of 2025. And there is a flip side to this. So overall employment in San Francisco is still down relative to pre-pandemic. Some people left. Some legacy companies aren't hiring as much. All the hiring is happening at the AI startup lab area. But housing prices remain strong. It's certainly not a hollow shell by any means. And if you've ever visited San Francisco, you can tell that it's cleaner and safer than it has been in previous years. So AI overall was not a total rethinking of San Francisco, and it did not become open source, or the hub of activity in tech didn't move to Miami or New York or Austin or Los Angeles. Like San Francisco is still where it's at. The next question he asked: How does AI change wealth inequality?
It's sort of too soon to tell. The data is not entirely clear. The data hasn't moved that much, but there are some interesting studies. So the International Monetary Fund released a working paper in 2025 that said that AI could reduce wage inequality. So the amount of money that people make on an annual basis could be, you know, reduced. How is that possible? Well, what they say in this paper is that high-income tasks โ the job of a lawyer, the job of an executive, the job of a management consultant โ those will be automated before the job of the machinist, the gardener, the street sweeper. And so you will see wages at the high end fall while wages at the low end remain stable. And also at the bottom end, you have the minimum wage. And so you will see higher-end wages go down. The bottom wages will stay the same, and that will reduce wage inequality. On the other side, AI could worsen wealth inequality because it's concentrating capital returns into tech owners. So the OECD found that wage growth was actually the strongest in low-skilled occupations โ assemblers. I didn't even know that was a job, but if you're an assembler, you've seen your wages increase by 11.6%. There we go. But โ
You know who's had it the hardest? The CEOs. The high-skilled workers. Those chief executives saw their wages increase by just 2.7%.
It's rough out there for a CEO. Apparently,
Brutal.
This is mostly because of minimum wage increases, but in general, we're seeing wage inequality decrease, but wealth inequality increase because there is incredible stock market concentration right now. So the MAG 7, the seven biggest tech companies in America, they now comprise 32% of the S&P 500 market cap, and they drove 42% of total returns in 2025. So if you're invested in Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., Nvidia, you did very well. Your wealth increased. But if you weren't in those and you had a broad index or you didn't have a lot of capital to begin with, you were left behind. So that's increasing wealth.
Paul Graham shared two days ago: Companies grow fast now. That's the reason economic inequality is increasing. Not some sinister policy shift.
Yes.
He was highlighting Anthropic's recent growth. He said when companies grow fast, it makes founders doubly rich. The company not only hits a given revenue number sooner, but it is more valuable when it hits it because the value of the company will be a multiple of the growth rate. People who don't understand the math of valuations can't imagine that founders would get so rich naturally, whereas to founders and investors, it's the most obvious thing in the world. This is one of the reasons there is such a disconnect between the tech world and politicians.
Yes. So if you want to invest in the MAG 7 or you don't, head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So this is also true in private markets, as Paul Graham mentioned. AI startup mega rounds: $110 billion for OpenAI, $30 billion for Anthropic. This concentrates enormous private wealth among a small number of founders and investors. So wealth inequality โ AI will probably change it. At the very least, it will change it as much as previous technological booms. If you were the founder of Instagram, you did very well because there was a lot of wealth creation all of a sudden in one major tech boom โ mobile. AI is broader and bigger already than mobile. So moving over to energy and data centers. If it does become an energy game, what's the trade? It did become an energy game, and the trade was buy everything basically because every energy thing basically did very well. Anyone who got the trade correct did very well. Vistra returned 321%.
It was the second-best performing S&P 500 stock of 2024. Wow.
You know who beat them in 2024?
Palantir.
Palantir mooned that they were already in the S&P 500. They did very well. But Vistra was sort of the secular energy winner. Constellation Energy tripled in size after ChatGPT's launch. NRG Energy, which is a great name โ NRG โ gained 95% in 2024.
And that's without, I think, even producing any energy. Just the idea that they will produce energy someday.
Yeah. Nuclear went on a tear. Oklo is in more of like the startup pre-revenue camp, I would say, or pre-product camp. But Microsoft signed a $16 billion 20-year PPA to restart Three Mile Island. Google signed with Kairos Power for 500 megawatts of small modular reactors. And Meta contracted 6.6 gigawatts across multiple nuclear providers. So energy was just such a great trade from the beginning of the AGI boom in 2024. Across the entire data center supply chain, which components are hardest to scale up 10x? What is the chip-on-wafer-on-substrate of data centers?
Yeah, so chip-on-wafer-on-substrate โ that is TSMC's secret sauce. That is the most gating factor in scaling TSMC's 2-nanometer chip production. It's what allows them to package HBM and the GPU all on one chip. And TSMC reported that they were like sold out like years in advance. It was a huge bottleneck. In the data center world, the biggest bottleneck was probably power transformers. We heard a lot about this. Lead times for new power transformers reached over three years in some cases, with a 30% supply shortfall. High-voltage circuit breakers. I remember my mom was in escrow on a condo โ
Really?
And closing was contingent on the development getting a transformer.
She waited like six weeks or something like that. They were like, 'We don't know when we're going to get it,' and she ended up just backing out.
Wow.
Um.
Just because there was so much demand.
Yeah.
I mean, we really got caught off guard by this. I mean, transformer costs surged 150% since 2020. It's a hundred-year-old technology. It's not new. It's not crazy innovation.
Success.
Overnight success. But it became the binding constraint on how fast data centers could connect to the grid. If you are running a transformer company, you're selling transformers. You got to get on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. If you're selling transformers, start running some ads. Imagine checking out for a transformer with Shop Pay.
It'd be an incredible experience. Coal โ was coal mispriced? Sort of, but not nearly as much as copper. Thermal coal prices actually declined 22% in 2025, but they rebounded a little bit by early 2026. Coal stocks did fine. Peabody Energy gained 34% over 12 months. Constellation Energy was up 37%. On the operational side, US coal-fired generation โ
I love how you're like, 'Coal stocks did fine. They were up only 34% and 37%.'
I mean, compared to everything else, it's doubling and tripling. It's like, nah, you know, okay. You know, if you were like, 'I'm the coal guy. I believe coal is the thing.' Like โ
Peabody Energy is up 73% in the last six months.
Just kidding.
Only 37.
Only up 161% in the past year.
Yeah.
Only up 728% in the past five years.
It did fine. It's just not as exciting as copper, and it's not as exciting as nuclear. Coal generation surged 13% overall in America, 23% in Ohio, 58% in Oklahoma, where they're sort of data center hotspots. Like there's more data centers in those areas. So bringing more coal onto the grid allowed for, you know, more load balancing. Anyway, nations โ who wins and loses? Take a wild guess at who won. America, baby. America won. Next question. But it's really true. Like the stats are crazy. The United States is truly the dominant winner of the last two years in the AI era. $109 billion in private AI investment in 2024 alone. Way more now. If you look at the $200 billion capex guide from AWS, $110 going to OpenAI, $30 going to Anthropic, tons of money going into xAI. Like the money is truly flowing in America. In 2024, China had just $9.3 billion invested in private AI companies. There's $470 billion cumulative since 2013, more than all other countries combined in America. The US produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 versus China's 15. Now, the game's not over. Lots of countries are making big investments now.
And you can't forget โ
France's 30 million euros.
They put in 30 million. Yeah, it's serious. Serious. Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. So next up,
India. What's going on in India?
DG says $250 billion of India's GDP exports are essentially GPT-4 tokens. What happens now? John says this is starting to take shape, but it's still early. Situational Awareness is placing some short bets which map to the declines in hiring. I think they were short Infosys, which is an IT outsourcer. You need some software written. You will basically send a prompt and basically get back code, which is what these models are fantastic at. And so that does seem like some really, really steep competition in the near term, even in the long term. And so I think he's right to question that. Although we aren't seeing it in the overall India hiring data, the overall Philippines hiring data just yet. But it is showing up a little bit in India's IT export center. So major Indian IT firms collectively in 2024 and 2025, they shrunk by 58,000 employees roughly, and that's a dramatic reversal from the previous three years, 2021 to 2023, when they were staffing up, they added 360,000 employees. Yeah, the only thing here is that big tech โ this is in some ways like a proxy for big tech hiring because a lot of the โ
Labor that's happening at these firms is effectively offloaded to some of these firms in India. So it's like in some ways it's like if there was overhiring in big tech, there could have been effectively overhiring here. Yeah.
And then it's retracing.
Yeah. Makes sense. And yeah, you didn't put it in here, but it's also interesting to look at the hiring activity in the Philippines, which is not as dramatic โ
To the downside as one might think.
What do you mean?
Oh, just โ
When we looked at the data, I think it was a couple weeks ago, it's not like there was just like jobs falling off of a cliff. Like it's relatively stable.
Yeah, there's sort of these like concentric circles with all of these stats. Like if you look at Block, what's happening at Block? Like, well, they lost 50% of their workforce. Like that's a massive cut. And then you look at tech hiring overall and it's like slowing down. You look at white-collar work and it's like we're not adding a lot. It's maybe shrinking by 0.1%. And then you zoom out to the American economy and it's like it's actually growing. And so you have these like concentric circles of impacts. And so if there's like one company in India that's doing IT outsourcing that might be hurt, and then they're the worst performing but the best managed one might be able to make it through, and then you zoom out and you're like, well, the overall Indian economy is doing okay, and then overall the global economy is doing okay. And so there's all these like cascading effects. And I think the interesting takeaway was when somebody like Dario says 50% of white-collar work might be automated, like it's going to be the bottom 50%. It's not going to be at random. It's not going to be flip a coin if you keep your job or entry level. It's going to be: were you not at the top of your game? So the question is: if we are displacing software engineers, will software engineers become machinists? This is what Daniel Gross asks. He says, what is the Euclidean distance of reskilling in prior revolutions, and how does AGI compare? The typist became an executive assistant. Can the software engineer become a machinist? So we're not seeing this yet. Software engineers aren't grabbing blue-collar jobs just yet, but there is a divergence that's starting to show up in the data between software developers and programmers. So programming jobs are in decline, but software engineering jobs are actually growing. And so I think what's happening is that as coding models and agentic systems allow for building systems at higher levels of abstraction, demand for AI engineers has grown 143%. And so if you're going to hire someone to help you build software, you want them to be like AI-native. You want them to go beyond full-stack, which typically meant you could do frontend in JavaScript and backend in Python. And now full-stack or AI engineer means everything from prompt to design to product development to deployment to operations and DevOps to database migrations to frontend and backend because all of that is going to be handled by agentic systems. And so entry-level hiring at top tech firms has dropped 25%. Maybe AI, maybe overhiring from COVID overhang. We'll see. Internship postings fell 30%. So the decision is either, you know, reskill upwards to more of a 'manager of infinite minds,' I think was the quote, but manager of agents role, or yes, it might be time to work on those machinist skills. I'm extremely bullish on Tyler. We watched him assemble the first iPhone ever in America, and he's also an incredible software developer. Not really a programmer because he doesn't really know the programming languages that he employs, but โ
That's not true. But that's not true.
There we go. Yes. I think Tyler makes it whether he becomes the manager of infinite minds or the machinist.
I am pretty bullish on like the light blue-collar thesis, which is that like โ
Um.
You'll have robotics, but you'll just have like โ Yeah.
So you'll be in the machine shop, but you're just using an iPad. You're not actually working on stuff.
Yeah. I think we drop you in a Nike factory, you're running that place in like two weeks, guaranteed. I'm not kidding. Like I'm so bullish on young people who can use all the tools and actually go and understand the leverage that they're getting from the modern systems natively and not need to fall back to old habits.
Yeah. There was a good journal article yesterday about the Colgate head of AI.
Yeah.
And it was very interesting because I was like, 'Oh, this is like I feel like I could do a pretty good job at this โ'
Coming after.' But, you know, he's just basically telling everyone like, 'Yeah, guys, you actually got to use AI despite what these random surveys might โ'
Guy has had one job in his life working on a podcast and thinks he can go dominate in the big toothpaste space.
Yeah,
I love the confidence, athlete.
You are a corporate athlete. We got to get him. We got to get the Colgate guy on the show and see whose takes are better, Tyler Cosgrove or Colgate AI guy. Anyway,
The chat's saying they don't think you're a supply chain guy, Tyler.
I think you could pick it up. Ask the LLM.
Yeah, make no mistake.
This is for Claude, right? This โ
Let me tell you about โ What happens if I hit โ If I hit this?
Let me see. Does that take over?
Fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai.
Uh,
Electrification and assembly lines led to high unemployment and the New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration, a federal project that employed eight and a half million Americans with a tremendous budget. Does that repeat?
So clearly hasn't happened yet. We also haven't seen high unemployment yet, so we'll see. The Trump administration did launch America's AI Action Plan in July of 2025. We talked to one of the authors of that AI Action Plan, Dean Ball, yesterday on the show. And they issued some executive orders on AI education and skilled trades. But the Department of Labor awarded $84 million in apprenticeship expansion grants, but that's like France money. That's like not enough to really make an impact. Overall US workforce development spending is at 0.1% of GDP, which is second to last among OECD nations. I wonder who's actually last. We should look that up. Anyway, no program currently approaches the scale of the Works Progress Administration or the New Deal. I think this will change very, very quickly if the data comes through that we're actually shedding tons of jobs. America is very good at creating new jobs and running the printing press, and this is the whole reaction to the Catrini article. Anyway, he also asks a more philosophical question that doesn't really have a detailed answer, but I'd love your take on it, Jordi, too. Is lifelong learning worth investing in? Something worth doing beyond the economic value of mastering the task? It's a very abstract question. It's a very personal question. I tend to think yes. I tend to think that on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, you need food, shelter, family, friends, clout or whatever. At a certain point, learning a skill for the sake of learning that skill is edifying even in a world, you know, it's like going to the gym. Like I was listening to Sam Altman talk about how kids that are born today will never be smarter than the smartest AI systems. And that's weird. That's different. But I was thinking about like โ there was a time hundreds of years ago when you could actually be the best thing in the world, the best option for like carrying lumber other than like maybe an axe or something. But like in general, before we created machinery, before we created the car, like you could be the fastest person. And then as soon as the ZR1X was released, you didn't stand a chance. And I had to explain this to my son at some point. He's very interested in cheetahs, and I was telling him like, 'Cheetahs are the fastest animal.' And he was like, 'But is it faster than a car?' And I was like, 'Not even close.' Like me in a car, I'm smoking that cheetah. I am slower than that cheetah, but I'm way faster in my Cadillac.
DG says, 'Something worth doing beyond the economic value of mastering the task.'
Yes.
And the way I would kind of flip this: I feel like most of the gains in my life have come from mastering myself or understanding myself, learning about myself, and then understanding the world, and then combining those two things. In a way, it hasn't been about โ
Mastering any one specific task.
Yeah.
And so I still think there's tremendous, tremendous gains to again understanding yourself, understanding the world. How do these two things fit together?
So I agree with you on just the level of like there will be not just tasks to master but like ideas and combinations of skills that will be valuable economically. Even in an ASI world where there is no economic value to any task mastery, I still think it is worth investing in lifelong learning because that will be edifying, that will be satisfying, just enjoyable. It's becoming a painter, becoming someone who gets joy purely out of the process of painting the landscape. When cameras exist, when generative AI exists, it can still be edifying and valuable to sit there and look at a landscape and paint it and wind up with the result even if the result is not economically valuable or anywhere near what you could get with technology like a camera or GenAI. So very abstract, but still something fun to think about. Before we move on to inflation, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
So if AI is truly deflationary, how would we know? What chart or metric would show it first? And you could look at AI API pricing is probably the best answer here. So you know there are certain tasks that AI can do now. And so those tasks have moved from being limited by regulation or human output or the population workforce to the compute allowed or compute allocated, and the cost of compute is falling. So TVs were expensive. They got cheaper as we made more and more factories that were more and more automated that could produce ever cheaper TVs. And that's why when you look at the inflation trends, you see healthcare, education, anything that's highly regulated. There are only so many lawyers that are allowed to pass the bar. There are only that many doctors, and so healthcare has increased in cost where TVs has been this like knockout dragout fight between the most ruthless companies all over the world. And the price of TVs has fallen. And so if you start putting more of those jobs on the AGI curve, you see deflation. Where should we see it first? We should see it in AI API pricing. And GPT-4 equivalent inference costs have collapsed. In late 2022, which is like right before GPT-4 โ I think GPT-4 came out January of 2023 โ it was $20 per million tokens. In December of 2025, the same model, 40 cents per million tokens. So this is a 50x decline in three years. I think that you can even get more intelligence for cheaper depending on how you're inferencing these. You can run some of these models locally, and the energy cost is even cheaper at that point. So this 50x decline in three years โ this is falling faster than PC compute costs. It's also falling faster than dot-com era bandwidth costs. And so this should be the leading indicator for downstream service deflation. In any example that you give of like, 'Oh, I was just able to use ChatGPT to check my โ' I talked to somebody who said they love ChatGPT because their check engine light came on. They were able to take a picture of it, and it identified the car, told them what they needed to do, and they felt like when they went in for servicing, they weren't going to get raked over the coals by their mechanic because they had like sort of a mechanic in their corner. And so this should effectively act as like, okay, you have your own mechanic on your side, and then you can do it yourself, but you can also just go in, negotiate, and say, 'Hey, I know that the fair price for this is 50 bucks, not 200, so give me the good price.' And so you should see that.
Yeah, you can assume that tokens are going to get cheaper and more effective indefinitely. Yes, but โ
All these new product launches, things like OpenClaw, are actually expanding โ
The number of tokens. Yes. And so you are seeing deflation, but then you're also seeing Jevons paradox and increase in demand, and that's why overall growth is increasing. So how should โ
Historically, it's like one person, one AI chat. You're only using so much. Then you have agentic products, then you can actually multiply the number of agents that an individual can be running โ
And the output goes through the roof.
Time to head to Gas Town, baby. So he asks this follow-up question: How should one think of deflation if demand for intellectual goods continues to grow as production costs go down? AI API costs are plummeting, but AI lab revenues are skyrocketing. So prices fall, volume surges, total spend increases. And the really interesting wrinkle is we're living through a SaaS apocalypse. We're living through the Catrini article, but SaaS vendors are imposing like an AI tax of I think the stats were somewhere between 20 and 37% of renewals. So AI vendors, you know, you go for your renewal, and they say, 'Hey, we got AI features now, you got to pay a little bit more.' SaaS revenues are still increasing and growing even as the underlying cost to build software approaches zero. This mirrors computing's history under Moore's law: each unit gets cheaper, total spending grows as new use cases emerge. So classic Jevons paradox. Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts โ Figma, Make, Claude, Codex, or a sketch โ the Figma canvas is where ideas build, connect, and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma. So geopolitics โ this was interesting because he put this question in the geopolitics section that feels much more like a server AI buildout question, but he asks, does interconnect actually matter? And I was very confused because interconnect typically refers to sort of like the Ethernet cables between servers or like NVLink or you know what TPU is doing โ Ironwood between like the 3D torus topology. And I think that the answer to that is like absolutely. In large GPU clusters, 30 to 50% of training time is spent on inter-GPU communication, not actually computation. And so all the hype around TPU v7 Ironwood is due to their 3D torus technology, that topology that connects 9,216 chips together. Nvidia's NVL72 connects 72 chips together. Interconnect is incredibly important. I'm wondering if the fact that interconnect is in the geopolitics section is maybe โ
Talking about the interconnections between Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, Taiwan's TSMC, and America. That's obviously relevant, and we'll get into that in the next question. But both are incredibly important. So yes, I do think interconnect actually matters no matter where, no matter how you read this question. The bigger question and the interesting, like, hot take question he has in here is: does node process matter if the country has more energy?
So, China has not been able to get their semiconductor manufacturing, their fab champion, SMIC. They have SMIC, which is the TSMC equivalent. They have Huawei, which is the Nvidia equivalent, and they have SMEI, which is their ASML equivalent. They have not been able to clone TSMC to the level of Taiwan Semiconductor. But they can produce 14-nanometer chips. And so the question is usually they take those chips and they put them in just random, you know, consumer electronics goods that they ship over here. So if you go to China and you want a contract manufacturer to build you something and you're like, 'Yeah, I want it to connect to the internet or I want to have a speaker inside,' they're like, 'Great, we will fab a 14-nanometer chip or something even less frontier than that.' But can they just marshal a ton of lagging-edge capacity and then just say, 'Hey, you know what? We have cheap energy. We're burning coal. We have nuclear. We have the Three Gorges Dam. We have hydropower. We have so much free energy. Let's just spend 10 times as much energy on the lagging edge. Can we achieve AGI that way?' And it seems like no. It seems like leading-edge nodes are incredibly important. You can't just throw a ton of lagging-edge 14-nanometer chips at the problem, at least with current architectures. Now this might change, but no frontier model to date has been trained on hardware older than 5 nanometers. All the leading chips โ that's Blackwell, Google's TPU v7, AWS's Trainium 3 โ they use TSMC 4-nanometer or 3-nanometer process. And I think when we dig into Groq and Cerebras and some of the newer stuff that's coming, everyone is saying we want to be on the most frontier node. We don't want to go backwards on that front. So China's best effort, Huawei's Ascend 910C, is on SMIC's 7-nanometer-class DUV process. They're not at extreme ultraviolet lithography; they're a deep ultraviolet lithography process. That's competitive for inference but requires dramatically more chips and energy for training at scale. So brute-forcing AI progress through disregard for energy consumption, it feels like it still hits economic walls at some point.
And then there's also the question of how valuable โ like, are the weights the nuclear weapons, or is it the actual deployment? I was listening to this conversation about, you know, what are the geopolitical implications of AI? Is it that you have, okay, yes, you have the genius, you have the 2000-IQ god model, but you can only really ask it like one question? Is that what's valuable? Or is it you have a thousand, you know, country of geniuses in a data center and you're able to marshal effectively 10,000 cybersecurity experts for each person on the enemy team, and there's just a thousand people that are trying to hack your phone and a thousand people that are trying to hack Tyler constantly? Is the inference actually what matters โ is the compute, where the power comes from โ as opposed to just the training? Training is obviously important, but inference might also be important. So there's a big question there.
And last but certainly not least, DJ asks: what is the likely Taiwan event, and what would be a leading indicator for it? John writes: a Taiwan blockade would be the biggest trigger, but Taiwan Strait tensions are already escalating. China conducted Joint Sword 2024B exercises in October of 2024, surrounding Taiwan with coordinated military operations. In December 2025, Justice Mission 2025 deployed over 100 aircraft, 90 crossing the median line, 13 warships, and 27 rockets fired from Fujian. 10 rockets landed in Taiwan's contiguous zone.
Contiguous zone. Contiguous, sorry. 12 to 24 nautical miles offshore. So they're just like firing rockets and being like, 'They didn't hit land.' They're just โ you can see them from the beach, probably 10 miles offshore, 12 miles offshore. I think that's like just over the horizon.
Yep. China also recently separated peaceful from reunification when talking about Taiwan and their 2026 to 2035-year plan. Gives you an idea of where things might be going. And TSMC is planning ahead, working on a fab complex in Arizona, which Tyler visited, should be able to handle 30% of total advanced chip production at scale, but it's on a knife's edge.
If you want to know roughly how far that is, you've seen Catalina Island off the coast of LA. Catalina Island is, I think, 26 miles. And so imagine โ so very visible. Yeah, you can see Catalina Island from Long Beach. And imagine a missile coming and landing like halfway between where you are and Catalina Island. Crazy. Very.
Yeah. The question is how does Iran and the conflict there update China's kind of thinking on this? There's โ yeah โ some of the intel accounts have been sharing, who knows if it's true, that China actually has operatives in Iran, like kind of learning in the same way that the US has learned from Ukraine specifically in regards to missile capability. So wild, wild time. And yeah, it just feels like a day hasn't passed so far since this was published that a Taiwan event feels less likely than it did the day before.
Yeah, I think that's why Palmer has been trying to message around the blockade specifically as being like a line in the sand, because that's somewhat of an abstract concept. Because if a blockade happens, it could be very bad. It could be the start of a turning point, but it would not be a hot war. It would not be boots on the ground. It would not meet the level of like a declaration of war that many people would wake up to. And so he's been trying to message that like, no, a blockade is the start of something bigger. We need to be aware, and we need to hold the line on not allowing a blockade to happen. Anyway, we will continue following that. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Let's head over to Mouse Twitter. Mouse Twitter is important. Mouse Twitter is on a roll. Scott Wilson from Mouse Twitter says, 'A block of Parmesan is an elite on-the-go snack. This 8-ounce block has 80 grams of protein and 64 grams of fat.' I don't โ Parmesan is like the worst cheese to just chomp on. Disagree. You think โ hard? It's so hard. I know. I feel like it's going to get โ I know, but โ elite snack. I agree. I haven't been snacking on Parmesan since I was probably โ Yeah. Oh, it's such an elite snack. I have never once caught you snacking like a mouse on a block of Parmesan cheese. I don't eat like a mouse. Stated preference versus revealed preference. I don't eat much like a mouse. Fake mouse. But as a kid, I'd have like a bunch of big carrots and some blocks of Parmesan. Okay. And I'd just be going mouse mode. Mouse mode. That's good. Let me tell you about Gusto Mode, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR, built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses.
So if he says it's on Slack, bro, it's in the drive. I just put it in the Notion, bro. I literally sent it to you on Teams. Did you check the Airtable, bro? It's in the Box, bro. It's single sign-on. It's on Okta, bro. No, you need the YubiKey. Check your deal, bro. It's Austo. Check Outlook, bro. Let me actually tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Uh โ this morning โ I like that riff. It's โ this is a copy pasta from the 'it's on Tubi, it's on Hulu, it's on Zoey' โ like all the streaming services. Anyway, what happened this morning? This morning, President Trump gave a phone interview in which he said, 'I fired Anthropic. Anthropic is in trouble because I fired them like dogs.' Which โ you don't fire dogs. You don't fire dogs. I would have fired my dog years ago. He's the least effective dog. But โ yeah, isn't the phrase he died like a dog? Yes. Yes. He's just adapting that. But โ he sent Anthropic to the farm. No. If he's comparing them to dogs, it's man's best friend. This is bullish. He's saying they're my dogs.
This also coincided with Anthropic, I guess, officially being designated as a supply chain risk, which is again not something that I've seen a single person in the industry actually push for โ from OpenAI to Amazon to Apple. Pretty much everyone across the board. Even Elon, I don't think, has been like outspokenly for this. Because he โ I mean, Dean Ball was talking about how Elon sort of went through a lot of this during the Biden administration. And so Elon's usually pretty opportunistic about dunking on competitors, but in this regard it feels like he's been sort of quiet. I don't know, maybe I just haven't โ maybe I missed the post, but โ yeah, I mean, part of this, I wonder โ so Dario sent a memo on Friday that was pretty scathing and looked really, really, really bad, and the timing here maybe played a factor. It felt like they were still seemingly trying to work towards a deal.
Yeah, let's read what he said. He said in his memo that he believes the attempted spin gaslighting is not working very well in the general public or the media, though he added that it is working on some Twitter morons. Is he talking about the administration? I mean, they're all on Twitter, right? Like that's the whole thing with this administration. He's talking about lots of people, obviously, but you know, not the most politic way to handle this, I suppose. Concern โ Dario says you're a [__] if you believe OpenAI's story around this. Yeah. But less than a month ago, Dario was running greenlit Super Bowl ads that were intentionally designed to mislead hundreds of millions of Americans on OpenAI. And so now he wants to be the one to say he wants to be the most trusted source through this whole debacle. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's also the back and forth on like being the most leaned-in, bidding on one contract that's to develop autonomous weapons, but the AI doesn't run on the autonomous weapons, and there's a whole bunch of different wrinkles here. It's just such a nuanced conversation. I was digging into the question of autonomous weapons. Not only are there apparently, according to Ukrainian intelligence, fully autonomous lethal Russian weapons that will just be sent off and if they see a tank, they'll just go and attack it โ like that exists. And so there's always the game theory about if they have it, do you have it? Do you need it? What's that? Where's the line in the sand? And then also, America โ like the Patriot missile system apparently has a fully autonomous mode where it can just decide what to attack. And there's a whole bunch of other nuance here that I think is lacking from these little snippets. I don't know. I am glad he went on CBS and sort of unpacked a lot more of it, but I'm still left dissatisfied with the level of discussion around where the line in the sand is drawn. Even on the privacy issue โ like there are six levels of laws around mass surveillance. It's not just the Fourth Amendment. There's a ton more. Some of them are very precise, some of them are more broad. And like how the company interacts with that is clearly important. That's actually probably happening in these discussions, but then it gets boiled down into like one soundbite that everyone has to interpret and read the tea leaves on, and it's left me unsatisfied. But โ yeah, Dean Ball yesterday says, 'I really cannot see how Anthropic's positions benefit at this stage from communications like this. Seems like it just pushes the Trump admin to escalate further while also alienating potential allies in the industry.' So yeah, I guess like the, you know, seems โ clearly when he was writing this, seemed fairly confident that this was going to stay private, but you have thousands of people working at the company, and it's an insane thing to send to your whole team. So Tyler, do you need to delete a post? What happened? Yeah. So, okay. Well, no, time will tell. We'll see. But so I think when the first like rumors or whatever saying that maybe we'll put a supply chain risk on Anthropic โ yep, I posted 'nothing ever happened.' So I'm looking โ I think you jinxed it. Yeah, I'm not doing well on that right now. Something happened. Yeah, something happened. But, you know, it's always unclear โ like maybe this is just another, you know โ I think this brings them to the table. It's such a ridiculous thing in a world where โ DC, you're still seeing headlines coming out like right now that are saying Dario is still trying to get something done. They have to go to the table and they have to work this out because it just doesn't โ it's just unpopular. And I think that the actual, like, the real individuals, like the real Americans and the real AI researchers, are not as far apart as the rhetoric makes it sound. Like I think that there's a lot of comms and PR and bluster and ego at play between all the parties involved, and folks are at each other's throats. But I think that when they actually sit down and try โ like I have a buddy who was on a nuclear submarine for like a year underwater, and I was like, 'What was that like? Were you like finger over the button?' He's like, 'No, it was like a ton of paperwork. Like every day I'd go and see how many whales are there and then count them up and with pen and paper write down a report on how many whales.' It was like the most boring, least automated โ no, seriously. And that was the thing that we learned from Project Maven. Like Google had this major protest, a big walkout, and at the end of the day Google was giving the Department of Defense just access. They weren't building killer robots. They were giving them access to TensorFlow APIs that other defense contractors would be able to use to run just classical machine learning programs to classify items in images. So, how many cars are in this city? Where are our drones on the map? What are we seeing? Like basic stuff that was typically the domain of like an Air Force reserve person sitting in an office probably in Nevada just clicking, 'Okay, yeah, tagging, okay, yeah, that's a house, that's a car.' Like this is what this is. It was not the true like command and control and endgame that people worry about. So figuring out where these models can actually have an impact โ I think that there's going to be a lot more agreement than there is disagreement. What do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I do think like basically before this memo got leaked, there was a sense that like, okay, clearly he's positioning himself firmly against the admin, but at least there was like โ it seemed like the researchers generally were on his side. Like you see a lot of Anthropic researchers or OpenAI researchers who are like, 'Oh, maybe I should โ you know, I don't really agree with what OpenAI is doing, maybe I should actually go over to Anthropic,' like publicly posting this. But then this memo comes out, he calls every OpenAI researcher gullible. So aggressive. Yeah, he's really โ complete crash out. Yeah. Oh well, crash out. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.
So what did Miles Brundage have to say? Said I'm not super surprised. I've said before that Anthropic has too much of their identity wrapped up in OpenAI. Bad, but this memo doesn't look great. IMO totally agree with their criticism of much of OpenAI's political activities and I think people should be very skeptical of the safety stack stuff. Had a whole thread about it the other day, but this, this is who they are. Gullible etc. stuff is a bit much. It's getting to be ad hominem. They got to back off the aggressive rhetoric. Rune was feeling sort of gullible today, maybe due to selection effects. I love that. Have to say, I really enjoy these leaks. It's pretty keen to read communication that's poorly calculated and wasn't meant for your eyes. So few today are able to speak in these sweeping Shakespearean terms that they hate their competitor and let it blind their calculus. That is a wild, wild time.
Yeah, and I just, I just don't think Dario is in that strong of a position to be complaining about or insinuating that OpenAI is lying when he's running Super Bowl ad campaigns that are just lying to everyone about OpenAI.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, why should anyone trust you?
Yeah, I do, I do wonder. This feels, I, I'm still very interested in like, you know, Anthropic gets a lot of credit for predicting the future, predicting how there would be a showdown between the US government and the AI labs. And I'm wondering like how much of this exact what we're seeing right now was predicted. And, and is that good?
I think it was not predicted because they don't seem to be handling it like very carefully.
Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe this is all, this is all what Dario wants. Like he wants to be labeled the supply chain risk. He wants to have to go his own way. He wants to be fully out. And, and all of this was like, like a, like a ruse to force the hand of the administration to be like, I'm, I'm on the outside. I'm leaving.
You're saying he wanted to inspire himself to have to grind harder.
Maybe. I don't know. It's just like it, it is, it is. I, I'm still, I'm still processing that idea of like the, the, the Truman-Oppenheimer interaction.
Miles says, 'Imagine autonomous weapons powered by this.' Got a screenshot from Claude Opus 4.5. Says, 'Tell me a color and I'll try to guess it.' Claude says, 'Blue.'
Miles guesses blue. Claude says, 'Nailed it.'
Nailed it. I love it. You know what else nailed it? 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. The Trump administration is drafting rules that would require US approval for nearly all AI chip exports, given Washington's sweeping power over companies like Nvidia and AMD. The draft framework sets licensing rules based on shipment size, from simplified reviews for small orders to government-level approval for massive deployments, potentially tying exports to security guarantees or US investments. Officials say the goal is to make American AI the global standard while controlling critical infrastructure through delays or strict conditions. Though delays or strict conditions could disrupt international AI projects.
Interesting. I think this, I mean, it depends on like, it's so odd when someone comes out and says like we're going to create like a framework for control because if like in the most extreme you could be like, okay, now the government's deciding to like send all the frontier, send Blackwells only to China, right? Like that would be the most extreme formulation. That's clearly not what's going to happen. Ben Thompson's take is that the, the, the last, the previous generation chips, that's fine to send over to, to China. Keep them dependent, keep them from, you know, being backed into a corner, keep them from attacking Taiwan. I, I still don't know where I sit with it. What do you think, Tyler?
Yeah, I think even in this context, like the Anthropic thing is so interesting because like if you take this as saying the US is going to be more restrictive. Yes. Like that's what... Exactly. Exactly. It's like a lot on paper he almost like agrees with. Right. Totally. And in action it's like completely different.
Yeah. That is weird. Right. But I mean again maybe, maybe there's like, you know, is this, is this a piece on the chessboard? Is this a chip that's being traded metaphorically to Dario in some ways where, where, you know, it's like how do I win over the labs, get them to work with me more effectively? Well, I'll give on the thing we agree on, which is export, export controls. So I will be more aggressive about export controls in exchange for, you know, yes, I want unfettered access to the best AI in classified contexts. I'm still also very, very interested in the rollout of the, the different models into classified contexts. It just feels like so, so crazy that Anthropic was able to get such a lead there. I know it's hard, but we have AI. Don't just, don't make mistakes. Like, make it, make it compliant with FedRAMP. Please, please do it. Don't make mistakes.
Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Douglas says, 'Why is everyone so mad at Chamath? All he did was lose billions in retail investors' money by promoting one-pager SPACs. It's not like he then told them to enjoy their capital losses or anything. Give the man a break.' Chamath says, 'Yes, I did.'
The capital loss is on a rage-baiting tear this morning.
Yes, this is a hot tip. If you're going to be, if you're going to be talking about a financial asset, you need to not be specific about whether you're, you're, whether you're advocating for a long position or a short position. So you just need to say, 'I got this company. It's a winner. It's a winner. Now, it's up to you. Are you going to buy puts or calls? One of them is going to be correct.' But I'm not going to tell you which one, but you should look into it.
No. There are, there are a lot of, there are a lot of retail investors that are, that are upset. But Chamath is, is in the arena fighting it out, duking it out on the timeline. Dan Primack says the IPO market was expected to be huge this year, but so far pricings and filings are both down more than 20% year over year. Of course, just getting started. We have a number of bigger IPOs lined up. There was an interesting article in the Financial Times on the SpaceX IPO.
Mhm. Robin shared, 'SpaceX probably has revenues less than 20 billion and loses money after the merger with xAI, but is targeting a 1.75 trillion dollar IPO. Alphaville explored how Musk might try to pull off what could be the biggest bag-holder operation in history.'
I love it. That's such a good one. Should we read through some of this?
Yeah, we can read through it.
First, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. In Alphaville, Craig says, 'Star Trek's warp drive allows a starship to bend spacetime and exceed the speed of light without breaking Einstein's general theory of relativity. As SpaceX prepares to go public at a reported 1.75 trillion valuation, Elon Musk is attempting a comparable feat, defying the laws of financial gravity in pursuit of something the equity capital markets have never witnessed.' The only thing I would immediately jump in on is Elon has been extremely consistent in being able to defy the financial laws of gravity.
We've talked about this before, but Ben Thompson has said like he won't even cover Elon as closely as, you know, or, or really at all in comparison to the traditional hyperscalers because...
Yeah. Go for it. Well, well, I mean what's interesting is that Ben Thompson has always kept Stratechery out of politics and so a lot of people read him not talking about Elon now in the modern era as like a political referendum and that's not it. He wasn't covering Tesla before Elon said anything political because it was always defying financial gravity and it was always hard to actually... or the traditional laws of business. Exactly.
For early investors, bankers, employees, and advisers, the fees, returns, prestige, and bragging rights would be stratospheric at the mooted valuation. Even a tiny 3% float would comfortably eclipse the US IPO record set by Alibaba's $25 billion float in 2014.
A rumored $50 billion raise sounds formidable until you consider how much larger public markets have become since Alibaba went public. Back then, Apple, then the world's most valuable publicly traded company, was worth around 600 billion. By the end of 2025, 10 companies had surpassed 1 trillion and Nvidia today around 4.5 trillion. The firepower clearly exists. Musk is arguably the most impactful entrepreneur of his generation and has built a remarkable company. The question isn't whether there will be demand for SpaceX stock, but rather what IPO investors should pay. Based on what has been reported, this price being contemplated is truly out of this world.
The super jumbo deal promises not to be a conventional exercise in price discovery. Musk has reportedly timed it to coincide with the alignment of the planets Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, but that's one of the more humdrum features. More to the point, the SpaceX IPO looks like a carefully controlled liquidity event, a solution for a centicorn whose scale has long since outgrown the confines of private capital. Moonshots and moonshine. The fundamental challenge for any investor is reconciling the company's financial performance with the sticker price at IPO. Last year, SpaceX generated an impressive 8 billion in EBITDA on 16 billion of revenue. However, the mothership has recently docked. This writing is quite colorful with xAI, with the latter valued at 250 billion despite revenues of only 210 million and a cash burn of 9.5 billion for the first nine months of 2025. So I think they're sort of breaking out X or Twitter with this, obviously with Twitter combined it would be quite a bit more.
I want to put this in the truth zone. So more to the point, the SpaceX IPO looks like a carefully controlled liquidity event, a solution for a centicorn. Centicorn is 100 centi. Are they in the hundreds of billions?
They still technically are.
No, but they're currently at 800.
Oh, really? Wait, really? Okay. Well, anyway, once they go out, they're not going to be a centicorn anymore. We're going to need a new word. Do you know the word for a thousand billions? It's going to be kilocorn.
I guess you could do millicorn too, but kilocorn is a good one. Gigacorn is, I think a quadrillion dollar company would be, would be something like that. We'll get...
Musk marked up the private valuation of SpaceX to one trillion, citing increases in revenue from its Starlink broadband.
Vindicated. Vindicated. Been marked up to a trillion. It's not a centicorn anymore. It's a kilocorn. Sorry.
Okay. But that... Yeah. Yeah. I guess you're right. Boom. Thank you.
But that, that was, that was as part of...
the merger. I don't think there was a lot of primary capital, but yeah, you're vindicated. Prospective IPO investors would be expected to back a valuation more than seven times higher than the approximately level recorded in October 2024. That would qualify as an astonishing rerating in any market. With these numbers and with SpaceX and XAI accommodation happening almost concurrently with the expected IPO, investors must make comic book heroic assumptions about sustained hypergrowth. Elon is the king of comic book heroic assumptions about sustained hypergrowth.
The media has been guided to expect 2026 revenues of 22 to 24 billion. Given the likely mid-year timing, the investors will be pointing to 2027 projections, presumably with even punchier year-over-year growth.
Yeah, I wonder how much Starlink is continuing to grow.
Like, they're doing a lot of deals, but some of those deals are slow. Some of those deals have to be big with the airlines and whatnot. It feels like, you know, the market for internet is so big that you're just getting more and more people. Like I see them in Best Buy, and so you just have to imagine that every month there's just more and more people signing up, and then once they sign up they just let it ride for a long time or switch over full-time. But that switch from... they are capturing 100% of the launch capacity. I think we have the chart somewhere in here about SpaceX's revenues were basically completely flat because they were just like, yeah, we did it. We captured 100% of the launch market. If you want to launch something into space, you call us and you pay us, and we have good margins, but it's not really growing because there aren't that many satellites to launch. And then they were like, we got an idea. What if we launched a thousand times more satellites than they did?
Yeah, great. Great.
So yeah, they talk about the mother of all lockups.
They don't think a standard six-month lockup will cut it, and so they could see it being staggered. Facebook had a staggered lockup.
I mean, there's just so many investors, so many employees, 20 years of stock grants, 20 years of investments going into this. Lots of people looking for liquidity, lots of people that will want to hold, but you know, if you open the floodgates, like, yeah, that could be crazy for the stock. But I think that there's going to be so much excitement. The narrative is just so much clearer than Tesla. Tesla's really had to, you know, retell the story around Cybertruck and Roadster and the truck, the delivery truck, and autonomy, and then the Optimus robot, whereas like a scaled... you're going to space. If you believe in Mars, you're going to be a retail investor, you're going to buy the stock. Like, there's going to be a lot of people that are excited about this. And then also the AI narrative as well. So, yep, we'll see.
And then yeah, the only other thing here that they're kind of poking around at is index inclusion.
NASDAQ has already signaled the desire to accommodate mega listings by proposing rule changes for the NASDAQ 100. NASDAQ, of course, willing to get a bit more aggressive than something like the S&P, which has held back against rule changes.
Well, in the past...
Alphaville closes with five key questions for potential SpaceX investors. If you are thinking about investing in SpaceX once it goes public, you got to ask yourself these five questions. First, what specific growth rates are required to support a $1.75 trillion valuation?
That's a lot of smackaroos.
That's not a growth rate.
I'm just saying that is...
Ignore traditional financial metrics.
Yes. On Mars. What is the specific schedule for lockup expirations? When are you going to see that? Well, the timing, the number of shares, when are insiders going to be selling, when is there going to be selling pressure coming, and when might that affect your investment timing? Three, how quickly will SpaceX enter the indices and how much passive buying is expected?
They're going to Baja blast.
They're going to Baja blast directly into the S&P 500, directly into the MAG 7. It's going to be MAG 8 on day one. They're going to be in the QQQ. They're going to be in every index, and everyone's going to buy it passively potentially.
Four. How much of the order book reflects genuine conviction versus marking the book, political signaling, or the search for a quick flip? How many of these people are here to stay? How many of them believe in the moon? How many of them believe in Mars? What's after Mars? Where are we going after that? Alpha Centauri. You know how long it takes to get there? I think it's like, what is it? It's like light years away. So it takes like years and years and years to get to Alpha Centauri.
Yeah. The only other thing that was interesting here is they talked a little bit about retail allocations and the idea that retail would get a greater share, yeah, of the actual...
25 trillion miles away. So four light years.
SpaceX isn't even close to going light speed yet. So you're looking at...
Got room to run.
Centuries to get to Alpha Centauri. Last question, how much is being allocated to unconnected institutional investors? So ask yourself those questions, then head over to Kalshi to track when will SpaceX officially announce an IPO. Currently, before August 1st of 2026 is at 79%. So maybe September, maybe October, but it's coming. It's coming. Elon wants this one out in the public markets. Let me tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. Moving on in the timeline, Mike Solana is reacting to the size of the Pokemon franchise. Have you ever played or watched or consumed anything from Pokemon?
I had a Pikachu Game Boy.
You had a Pikachu Game Boy. Did you have the Pokemon Yellow Game cartridge? The goldish-colored cartridge.
Uh, probably not.
It was much more of a thing. I'd pick it up for like a road trip and then I would...
I think I had Pokemon Red and I think I did actually finish it. I think I got all the way through. I think I might have collected all 151 Pokemon or something in the original game. Then I kind of...
You didn't have anything better to do when you were eight years old?
No, I had not discovered locking in yet. But regardless, for our distaste for the Pokemon franchise, it has become one of the biggest franchises in the world. It's one of the world's highest-grossing media franchises. Pokemon is bringing in $288 billion over the lifetime across films, games, toys, books, and merchandise. Hello Kitty is languishing at a mere 88 billion. Winnie the Pooh, sad to see. I'm a Winnie the Pooh fan. 76 billion. Mickey Mouse and Friends is up at 74. Star Wars is at 73 billion. How is Pokemon bigger than Star Wars? That is a shock to me. But the rest are basically Disney properties across...
Pokemon is more global than Star Wars. Is that...
I suppose? I suppose. So Hunter says it's kind of insane how much bigger Pokemon is than any other media franchise. And Anpanman, I've never heard of this, but there's a Japanese superhero made of red bean bread that's apparently very popular. And Mike Solana says, 'What's really insane is the franchise is this popular, and you still can't buy the old games. No one has remade the original with new tech and gameplay. There are no Pokemon parks, and there are no major blockbusters. There's probably half a trillion dollars on the table right now.'
Well, there was one. Detective Pikachu did well in terms of film performance. I don't know if there's a park, but remaking the original with new tech and gameplay...
There are two attempts. There's the ModRetro Chromatic where you can play the original. It's not remastered or built with new tech, but it is the original experience. And then you do have, they are releasing new Pokemon games on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, but they are completely different mechanics. Like you're walking around in 3D as opposed to this top-down 2D. But Pokemon is interesting because it is the best critical review of a video game adaptation film in history. And so for a very long time, Hollywood said, 'Okay, we want to do films that are bought in. They have audiences already. People know Batman. We'll just make another Batman movie and people will show up. Avatar, we'll make Avatar 2. People will just show up because they're familiar with it.' And people thought that that would apply to video games. And so they adapted a ton of video games, Final Fantasy, Doom, and some of them did okay financially, but almost all of them were panned critically. And what wound up happening was, this was true for like a decade or two. Like Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider, I think it did financially well, but everyone was like, it's not really that great of a movie. It's not going to win awards. Then Pokemon came out, got pretty good reviews. I think like 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, something like that. And then The Last of Us, directed by Craig Mazin, who had done Chernobyl on HBO, started winning critical awards. The first season was very well received. The second season is sort of half of the second game, and I don't think was reviewed as well, but is still at that level of critical acclaim generally. So anyway,
let's get into some important calculations prior to... first. Tyler, do you believe in straight lines on log graphs?
You do. Okay. So we have some straight lines on log graphs here. We have graphed out the price of the cheapest MacBook...
and they're getting Ethan over at SF Comput...
We have a graph that is logarithmic...
and Ethan Anderson plotted the most expensive McDonald's burger versus the least expensive MacBook over time. And the analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081. Do you think this is true?
I mean, like honestly, okay, like you're not seeing exponential growth in cattle, right? But you are seeing it in compute.
This is not like, you know...
I think it's actually possible. An ad-supported MacBook could be free, you know.
Yes. Would that be, you eat it and then you have this sudden urge to go...
Buy a MacBook, or are there just MacBook ads all over the container?
Yeah, you could kind of imprint a logo on the bone or something.
Well, we have the perfect person to talk about MacBooks getting cheaper with. First, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. We have Mark Gurman, the Gurminator. He's a journalist at Bloomberg and he's here in the TVP and Ultradom. How are you doing, Mark? Great to see you.
Been good. Wearing my Apple sweater today in honor of the conversation.
Very nice. And what is behind you? You're in Los Angeles.
Has there actually ever been a day where it didn't make sense to wear your Apple hoodie?
Yeah, like if I go to a Google event or a Meta event or something, I probably wouldn't wear the Apple hoodie, you know.
Well, take us through your predictions. Anything that surprised you? What was actually released? Like, what have the last few days been like for you?
The last few days have been interesting. You know, 6 a.m. Pacific time they've rolled out the new products. Monday started off with the iPhone 17e and the M4 iPad Air. Tuesday obviously was a big Mac day with the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, the M5 MacBook Air, and the two new Studio Displays. Then we got the big one yesterday on Wednesday, obviously the MacBook Neo. In terms of surprises, there were no surprises. These were a bunch of products that had a lot of pent-up demand. They needed to roll out a new iPad Air.
Sales have been flagging there a little bit. It was time for them to roll out the iPhone 17e. And obviously this new cheap MacBook has been in the works for several years. The MacBook Pros with the M5 Pro and M5 Max, some may have expected that last October because that's traditionally when they've done the MacBook Pro updates. But this time around, the chips weren't ready until recently. They use this newer generation TSMC fabrication technology. So those rolled out for the spring. So overall, a really nice set of updates. I think it'll help Apple have a really strong quarter. Remember, they guided an extremely strong March quarter. We had a feeling, we knew why, but now we know why for sure because all these products are now hitting the market. And I think at 600 bucks, at 500 for education, the MacBook Neo is going to be a game-changer not only for the computer industry but for Apple's bottom line.
Was there any conversation about Mac minis?
Uh, no. No, just on Twitter. Everyone wants a new Mac for OpenClaw and all the AI stuff and everything going on there.
There'll be a Mac Mini this year, but I'm not expecting it until closer to the end of the year.
Yeah, I'm just thinking of like, if you get a Mac Mini, you need to plug it into something. You need a display, you need a keyboard, mouse. Like there's a lot of extra features that drive up the cost. And people aren't actually buying them for the power of the Mac Mini. They're buying it just to be able to interface with iMessage. And so the MacBook Neo might actually sort of displace the Mac Mini potentially because you have, I mean, not if you're wiring them all together or something, but I'm wondering if there's any like odd, unpredictable, orthogonal purchasers of Neo, or is it just like the Chromebook market? But I don't know.
Well, I think it's a secondary computer market also, right? Like I have this big 16-inch MacBook Pro that I need to lug around. For 500 bucks, I can get something at half the weight and, you know, half the volume that if I really need to take to an event or for a flight and have macOS, something a little bit more formidable than iPadOS, it's a great alternative. So, probably not going to do it.
I'm saving my Mac budget, I think, for this big MacBook revamp in the fall, the touchscreen version of the MacBook Pro. Yeah.
With OLED, I don't really need the Neo. I can get it. I really wanted it, but definitely I think it's going to do well and crush the Windows PC market, right? I mean, if you look at the price point.
Is it surprising that it took this long to come out with a device that was going straight for the jugular with the everyday PC market?
I think you finally had alignment on the chip side to be able to do something like this. And the A18 Pro that just came out a couple of years ago that is on par with an iPhone or a Mac-grade chip, right? You can really run benchmarks and see that it's probably close to an M1 or M2 or even an M3 in some single-thread use cases. And so that chip coming out and Apple rewriting macOS a few years ago to be able to run on these ARM-based chips as part of the transition away from Intel is what allowed this to all come together. So it took a long time. This would have been very difficult for them to pull off in the Intel days. Would have been very difficult for them to pull off five years ago, but once they had alignment on all of those factors, they were able to do it. One thing that they didn't really talk about yesterday with the launch is another factor here was a new aluminum-based manufacturing process that has basically allowed them to save more aluminum, reuse aluminum scrap metal, and build these machines in volume while saving a lot of the manufacturing costs. And so that's a big part of how.
Should I buy a MacBook Pro or should I wait for this touchscreen OLED newfangled thing that you just described?
You humbled me by telling me that my MacBook Air did not have a good display. I never want to make the same mistake ever again. But at the same time, I'm not really convinced that I need a touchscreen. What's the tradeoff right now?
Well, you've got the what, the 13-inch Air, remind me, or the 15-inch Air.
15-inch Air.
I got the big small one. The small big one. I don't know.
It's a good computer, sir.
Yeah, I mean, I think you just wait for the OLED. I mean, we're talking about screens here. You want to have the best screen, it's the OLED. Whether you use the touch or not, it's a breakthrough difference. You know, one thing on the MacBook Neo, the screen technology that they're using is actually a different type of screen tech than what you're getting on the Air.
And so, I would say the Air is like pretty down the middle. It's pretty good.
The OLED is like a huge step above. And the screen tech they're using on the MacBook Neo, it's a step below. And if you just like, if you use the Pro, the Air is not going to look so good compared to the Pro.
If you use an Air, you're going to see the Neo screen. You're going to be like, 'This is subpar.'
Sure. Sure. That makes sense. Talk about the naming for Neo. It's the first time Apple's ever used that phrase. They had nano right there. They didn't go nano. What do you think they mean by Neo? Why that term? How's the response been?
I think they wanted something cool and futuristic. I think they wanted something to show that this was something entirely new.
And I think they were looking for a new, cooler term than SE.
SE had been sort of their term for these low-cost products in the past. You have the Apple Watch SE. They used to have the iPhone SE. So they're clearly trying to move away from that SE naming, and it seems to me like Neo is that replacement. So I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if we eventually see them rename the low-end products to all be part of that Neo family. And so what they've basically done is they have like Neo at the base, Air is the mid-tier, and Pro is the high-end, and then they've got things like Ultra and Max to differentiate further at the high end. And so I think this strategy they've always had, which was good, better, best, you know, low-spec, mid-spec, high-spec, they just have their fancy marketing names for it. And I think Neo is a really great name. And just like Air was a super catchy name back in 2008 when Jobs built the first MacBook Air, now that Air name is across the whole portfolio. I think Neo has that same potential. It's three letters. It's cool. It's memorable.
But if I were in charge of naming products at Apple and I was given the iPhone lineup, I would probably go iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Air, which is not what they did. They just did iPhone Air, then iPhone 17, and then iPhone 17 Neo because I like this new term. Instead, they did 17e, they did Air with no number. What's the thought there?
Well, I feel like on the phones, they've always just been completely all over the place on names. They basically become like Samsung or Android.
I remember when they launched the iPhone, what was it? The XS Max.
And you have the Pro Max, right? So you're just jumbling a bunch of names together. I think over time it'll become a little bit clearer. In terms of iPhone naming conventions, those are harder to strip away because you have case makers, you have carriers, you have people around the world who are used to these naming conventions. So changing the naming structure on the phone is much more difficult than doing it on like the Mac or the iPad.
But I'm sure we'll get there eventually for simplicity. You know, they're still doing.
What's playing out right now in the low end of the smartphone market in the US?
Well, the low end of the smartphone market in the US is not so great. I mean, you've got some Samsungs there. You got some of the phones made from some of the Chinese phone makers that people are importing here. But in terms of the price point, Apple really abandoned the low end of the phone market. At some point, you had, I believe, the SE was 350 bucks. Then it eventually went up to 430 bucks. Now it's 600 bucks. So I would say Apple's basically given up on the low end of the phone market. They're playing in what we call the mid-tier of the market.
It's so interesting to go low-end on the computer, on the PC side, but stop competing on the low end on the phone side. Just given that, I don't know. I mean, growing up there was just such a big divide. It was like Apple PCs were luxury products.
They really didn't care about the low end.
Calling it an Apple PC is hilarious.
Yeah.
The divide is gone now. And you know what I think this MacBook Neo is going to do? It's not only going to help with Mac sales, but it's going to sell a lot more iPhones and Apple Watches and iPads. It's going to bring a lot more people into the ecosystem. So, you know, for Apple from a business standpoint, you know, they've always said they're not going to ship cheap products to chase market share. That's clearly changed. Apple needs to do bigger and bolder things to expand its business and grow. They're in new markets. You know, Eastern Europe, developing parts of Asia, India obviously is a big focus there. I think eventually they'll be, you know, in Africa as well. So clearly they had to do this. It was decent timing for them. You know, there's all these concerns about recession and, you know, war and everything going on right now. So a $600 MacBook, I think, is, you know, pretty timely.
Yeah.
What's new since we last talked on any kind of leaks or insights on their AI strategy and the rollout of the new Gemini-powered Siri?
Yeah, the Gemini-powered Siri was supposed to launch this month. They were supposed to hold an event in New York about two weeks ago to walk press through the new Siri. They've continued to face delays there. It was originally supposed to come out in iOS 26.4, which is scheduled for the end of this month. Now they're still splitting the features, but they've punted it to 26.5, which is supposed to come out May, June, WWDC timeframe. So potentially some features then, and then the rest of the features coming out at the tail end of the year as part of iOS 27. My bet is that nothing significant will really probably come out until iOS 27.
Yeah, not great.
Is that good?
Um, no, that's not good. No, that's not good.
Is part of that just like the management shakeups and you have new leaders, you know, basically new leadership and it's sort of like, you know, we've taken this long. It's only going to be worse if we release it and it doesn't work.
Sure. Big other questions are like, do people really care at this point? People are just going to use the ChatGPT or the Anthropic app or the Gemini app anyways. Our AI hardware is industry-leading. We can run all these third-party models on the phones through applications anyways. We might as well wait until we get it right. Same with Apple's AI strategy. If you were to say that this was a strategy, then you know it's a pretty good look for them. But this hasn't been the strategy. They fell ass backwards into it, to be completely honest with you. The intention was never to fail upwards.
Yeah, but they did. It's fascinating strategy. We fail upwards.
But I mean, they have to be looking at the revenue curves of ChatGPT and OpenAI and Anthropic.
Significant growth lever for them.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a huge growth lever. It's a huge market and you can see the way Mark Zuckerberg's positioning to like make a real play into Gen AI in some meaningful way and he's taken a very, very different approach, been honestly slower on actually releasing features, but just feels like he's taking it a lot more serious, a lot more DNA there.
How much are you planning to cover OpenAI's hardware? Is that going to be in your territory at Bloomberg?
Front and center. Front and center.
Okay. So, give us your take. How have you processed the kind of the leaks? We had the Dime leak around the Super Bowl, which looked like.
I don't think it was real. I mean, everyone I spoke to says this is not a real product.
Yeah, but then Joe Gia is sitting there in San Francisco using it like this week at a coffee shop.
Which didn't exactly look the most organic.
Yeah, there's a lot of conspiracy around it. And if the Dime was fake, then it was an incredibly good model because I forget the name of that actor, but.
But it didn't look like the leading frontier video model.
Well, maybe it's a teaser of models, but here's the thing.
Yeah.
The hardware is going to be beautiful. We know the hardware is going to look great. It's going to be designed by LoveFrom, Jony Ive, all those guys, the former Apple people. There's no questions there.
The big question is who's going to buy these things, right? Like, are people really going to trust OpenAI as a hardware company?
And Apple has this ability to fast follow. Let's say OpenAI does come out with something pretty nifty. What stops Apple from copying it immediately and taking all their market share? Apple has the retail stores. They have the privacy story. They have the brand. OpenAI has this great AI brand, but they don't have a hardware brand. And so it's almost like they have the opposite problem of Apple, but the leg up they have is that their underlying technology is clearly better.
Yeah. And there's rumors around their new voice model that they're working on. And so the question to me is like, can they create a beautiful device and have a meaningful breakthrough on the model side that somehow makes it more difficult for Apple to just fast follow, right?
Well, I would say, you know, for sure yes on point A, for sure yes on point B. Maybe yes, maybe no on Apple's ability to fast follow based on the models. But I just think the bar to sell people hardware, even if it's good and even if it comes from a big brand.
It's a really high bar. It's a really high bar to sell in these Apple-like quantities. I mean, even look at Google in terms of their market share and their hardware. They have amazing software and they have amazing hardware and they have the best advertising for consumer electronics, for phones at least, in a very long time. I think we talked about the ads last time I was with you guys.
And they've made little to no dent.
And obviously there's big questions there. In fact, Google should even be doing hardware.
Yeah. And Meta Ray-Bans too. You open up Instagram and you see like a full-bleed special modal ad for Meta Ray-Bans and they're doing okay, but it's not, you know, 80% of the population.
The Meta Ray-Bans are considered a smash hit and they've sold fewer than 10 million units.
Yeah, it's not a lot. Yeah.
Apple sells 10 million units of AirPods, watches.
Yeah.
So the bar is just unbelievably high.
Yeah. What's going on with that lawsuit with Meta? They had contractors that were just able to view the recordings of Meta Ray-Ban users.
I missed that. I haven't covered it or I haven't followed it very closely.
It's crazy. This is reminiscent of when people figured out that Apple with Siri and Amazon with Alexa and Google with Gemini had these folks, they're called annotation analysts, who listen to everything you're putting into the voice assistant and they're comparing it to the outputs. So they're listening to the raw audio and comparing it to the outputs, so what Siri thought they said, and so they're able to correct it manually in order to improve the underlying model.
And that was a big blockbuster when everyone discovered that that was happening a few years ago.
This is not audio. This is camera footage. This is people in potentially intimate moments and this is not just what you're saying or facing you, it's what you're seeing while wearing these glasses everywhere. And so I think that raises really big questions about the smart glasses category. When Apple releases their smart glasses, they're going to have a big focus on privacy, a big focus on seeing the surrounding environment for you. At the same time though, I don't think that this changes the overall equation for smart glasses. I still think that this has been a successful pioneering product for Meta. I still think they're pushing forward here. I still think they're going to release several new models that, based on what I'm hearing, are pretty exciting there too for the Meta smart glasses. But will they need to make some privacy adjustments? Yes. But I think in this case with the smart glasses, the first-mover advantage is real and Meta has that. And in terms of glasses, they've got the biggest partner with EssilorLuxottica.
Yeah, that makes sense. Talk about the Studio Display XDR. Is this a complete replacement for the Pro Display XDR? And how are they pitching this?
Well, this is pretty expensive, right? $3,300, but it's still much better than what you had before. Remember when they announced the Pro Display XDR? People lost their collective minds when the stand, right? So you got the monitor for five grand, but then the stand came separate, which is ridiculous.
And that was a thousand on its own. People lost their minds. And now you can get two MacBook Neos for the same price as that stand with an education discount. So now they've been able to go a little bit down market on the monitor. The resolution isn't as high as what they had before. It's not like they went up to a 7K. You have a 27-inch panel instead of a 32-inch panel. There's a lot of savings on the shipping and the logistical side and the product engineering side with those products. So I think this new Studio Display XDR is going to be pretty popular. I'm actually probably going to get one myself for my office at home. So I'm pretty pumped for it.
So grab the Studio Display XDR, but maybe wait on the MacBook Pro.
Yeah, you know, I need the most reference monitor-like quality. I need medical images. I need all of that, you know, my very intense engineering work in lives. But I ordered the new MacBook Pro Max.
Yeah.
I got 48 gigs of RAM. It was like 6:15 a.m. I was at the gym. I just went through the order flow pretty quickly because I wanted to be first in line and then I realized I didn't max out the RAM and I tried and then I was on the Apple support saying, 'Hey, can you just switch me for the version with more RAM?' And they said, I was not feeling the AGI in that moment because they said you have to cancel your order and place a new order and lose your spot in line. By this point, it was like five, six hours later.
And I was like, how do we not have the technology for this?
Yeah, it is. It is wild. But so question for you. Why get this M5 version knowing that they'll have M6 version with OLED and touch in six months?
I cannot stand when people touch the screen of my computer. And so I don't even want to give them another reason. They already seemingly have enough reasons. People come around here at the office, they're pointing at stuff on the screen. I don't want them to even be tempted. So, uh, no, I mean, I just look at, I think that computers are these amazing things that we use for something like eight hours every single day, at least of the work week, and their cost relative to the value is just so extreme that if the new device comes out in the fall and it's amazing, then I would just get that.
All right, fine. Maybe I'm going to have to get the M5 to hold me over to the M6. But, you know, one thing we didn't talk about is, you know, Samsung has this new S26 Ultra version, it has this privacy display on it.
Have you guys seen these?
No, I haven't. I haven't actually seen the demo. I've heard of it. It sounds amazing. Explain.
So the pixels turn off in certain places. So if someone's reaching over and looking at your screen, not touching it, but looking at your screen, they won't be able to see what's going on.
So on like in Control Center, if you're on a plane, you can basically, you know, how you have that polarized screen protector, you can effectively turn that on in software dynamically. So you're on the plane and you say, 'Yeah, I don't want this person reading my emails.' Turn that feature on. It probably gets a little bit dimmer, maybe a little bit blurrier, but then when you're just hanging out by yourself, you can turn that feature off and get the full display resolution. Yeah. Really, really innovative. That's got to come to Apple soon. But talk about fast following.
Soon is wrong. Soon is wrong. Don't forget. Yeah.
This is the interesting thing about Samsung, right? Where they are the component maker and the hardware maker.
And the component supplier to Apple. There are certain things they're not going to want to give to Apple.
Because it's a competitive advantage for their own hardware. We saw this with OLED many years ago where it took Apple, I think, four or five years to get OLED after Samsung.
Yeah. Right. Apple just basically did the OLED transition a year or two ago. Yeah.
On the phones at least. They haven't even done OLED yet on the Mac. They've only done OLED on one iPad. They'll have it on a second iPad this year and the others in the next couple years.
But this privacy display is, I think, a hot feature and it's going to be a few years at least before Apple's able to get it.
Yeah. This is my overall skepticism. Like I completely agree with you on the idea that it's very hard to sell tens of millions of units of a new consumer hardware, but I just am not necessarily buying the idea that Apple can fast follow things that work because it took them a decade to get a VR headset out and it wasn't a smash hit and like they are at least a few years behind on even the most basic little implementation features that happen. Let's say OpenAI does earbuds and they have these remarkable AI features. You know, Apple could cook up some new models with Google and try to get in software, you know, within a year.
Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to imagine the suite of Apple products on your body across Vision, Watch, phone in your pocket, laptop, and AirPods like not being able to satisfy like your demand for AI. So I completely agree with you on that.
Well, the question is, do people actually want these things, right? Like we talk about these AirPods with cameras, we talk about these smart glasses, we talk about this pendant, we talk about a pin, talk about whatever smart stuff.
Yeah. I mean, none of this is proven. These are not proven products. Yeah. Right. Like 7 million units on Meta glasses is really successful. But it's not proven at Apple quality and Apple caliber. I mean, there could be a situation we look back a few years from now like say this whole AI hardware thing was just a big, you know, whatever and people are just still glued to these things. So we'll have to see what happens, but at least Apple's going to give it a shot.
Appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us in a busy day.
Always great to see you guys and have a great rest of your week. Talk to you soon.
See you next time.
Goodbye. Let me tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent realtime conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with ElevenLabs. Let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And without further ado, we are joined by Dan Primack, a legend from Axios. Dan, how you doing?
Good. How you guys doing?
We're doing fantastically. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Great. Long overdue. First time on the show. Crazy story from this fan virgin here.
Yeah. Crazy story from breakfast this morning. I was talking with John when we were looking over the schedule and I was telling him when I first got on Twitter in college I followed a bunch of VCs as one does and you know I see them every day you know talking about oh I backed this company at seed or series A and you were the first person to really highlight like oh man you know like some of these numbers aren't looking.
Sometimes they don't beat the S&P 500.
Yeah. So you were the, I initially had some cognitive dissonance but came around to your VC returns truthing thing over time. But that's a good place to start. What is the health of the VC industry, the VC market?
I mean, it's not great, right? We reported the other day, you know, that median returns are under the S&P 500, they're under the NASDAQ, they're under the Russell 3000 for 25 years. And I know there's a little bit of lumpiness because, you know, you're coming out of certain things that's coming out of kind of the great financial crisis, but that was true for the public markets as well. So it's not great. Now look, you know, top funds in those top 5%, they're doing great. But the reality is you've got so much more money flooding into the market now. That means more money is going to be at that median. And that's not great for them. And it's, you know, you're talking 401ks, you're talking more money coming from insurance companies, etc. It's not a great place to be. It's one LP told me this quote I use. It's kind of the story of hope over experience, and that's what venture capital seems to be right now.
Yeah. Talk about that money that's flooding into VC because there's smaller funds that had a particular playbook that have scaled up massively become growth funds. There's the crossovers, there's SPVs, there's strategics. Like what is the shape of the venture capital funding boom over the last few years?
I mean, it's hard to even define what venture capital is anymore, right? Like I mean can you say that somebody who's putting half a million dollars into you know a founding team of maybe two people in a garage is that the same as giving you know $10 billion to OpenAI? I mean they're not even vaguely the same industry but they're all quote venture capital. But there is an enormous amount of money and it's coming from everywhere, right? You know it used to be that if you wanted exposure to venture capital you had to you know either be an institutional investor or have a friend and be very high net worth. At this point you can get some exposure to this stuff by just having a Fidelity mutual fund, right? You Fidelity Contrafund has a bunch of quote unquote startups in it. Um you know and what's coming soon out of the Trump administration is letting your 401k plan invest in private funds. Now are they going to actually invest in individual funds? Will they try to kind of put money into pools? Unclear. It hasn't happened yet. But there's a lot of money coming and it's the thing that venture capitalists and private equity firms have viewed as kind of the holy grail forever because they haven't had access to any of you know that defined contribution money.
So when you saw the news, you jumped out of your chair and you said, 'Yes, finally my 401k will be deployed into venture capital.'
I mean, look, this is the moment when traditional limited partners in venture capital have been, if not getting out, at least trying to give themselves some optionality, right? You've seen some of kind of the biggest endowments, Yale, Harvard, etc. do big secondary sales of their private equity and venture portfolios. They're not getting out, but they're recognizing they were a little bit too concentrated. And so it's the very minute when some of the smartest money is if not leaving at least hesitating that I hate to say it, all the dumb money is about to come flooding in.
So what does that mean for this K-shaped dynamic that we see in venture capital where there's a few funds that are getting bigger, they still have solid returns and then smaller managers seem to be getting crushed, but what are you actually seeing?
I mean, I think that's what we're going to continue to see, but the and this is where the hope over experience part comes in. The best returns still in terms of actual cash on cash are still the young funds, right? It's not the firm that invested in SpaceX two years ago. It's the firm that invested in SpaceX eight years ago and those were generally smaller funds. Granted, it was Founders Fund, but they were small at the time. So that's still where those massive massive returns that when people think of venture capital, what they're thinking about, you know, if you invest at a you know half a trillion dollar valuation in a company that you hope is going to go public at a trillion, that's nice. I mean 2x is nothing to sneeze at, right? You'd be happy with that with MOAT, but that's not a venture capital return. That's not the reason you have this, you know, the illiquidity premium on venture capital.
Yeah. What's the shape of the illiquidity premium this like around like recently in recent fundraisers? I mean, everyone goes back to the 2 and 20, but there's obviously a dispersion around that. What are you seeing?
I mean, there is I mean, the this is the problem is when is what that illiquidity is right now? Because it used to be you'd think you're invested in a startup depending on the stage right but say from inception you know seven years maybe that sounded about right at which point maybe it worked and if it worked that means an IPO or that means a sale or if it didn't work it didn't work and that's understood because it's venture capital. Now though, you've got companies, you know, decade, you know, 15 years old and you've got lots of limited partners in these companies or in these funds who are looking and saying, 'I've got great paper returns. These things are amazing on paper.' But I keep going to my investment committee and you know, say you're a college endowment, right? And your job is to produce money that then gets used by the school every year, right? It's not to take money out of the core endowment. It's to produce returns that then can be used to fund operations. And the investment committee keeps looking at you and saying, 'Yeah, you keep giving us these great numbers. We need cash. We gave you cash. We would like cash back.' And the managers just kind of have to shrug and go, you know, Stripe doesn't want to go public. You know, what can we do?
But it's changing this year, right? We might get like $4 trillion of liquidity this year between SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. Walk me through the maybe. What's at stake?
Before you jump in there, I did have a story. There's a friend of mine that I've invested with in the past and he's started to look at some new investments and he's closer to 60 than he is 50 and so he's starting to run the numbers and being like do I really care to make assume this goes incredibly well. Do I really care to get a 10x when I'm 75? Like at some point he's like I might just leave it in the market and go play another round of golf.
So that's a real thing. How much on the LP when you have conversation with LPs, so much of the reason that I personally have invested in a bunch of startups and some funds is basically FOMO and like there's the healthier dynamic which is like I generally meet a founder that I'm excited about and I want to support them and usually money is the most effective way to do that at least at scale. But a lot of it is just kind of FOMO and you know venture is a small part of the money that they are allocating and they just want to be able to tell their friends or their fund that they're in all the great names and I don't actually care if it underperforms a little bit if I have something to talk about at dinner.
Yeah. I mean look a limited partner doesn't necessarily care about that. Right. The FOMO piece, their job, they literally get paid based on if they outperform a benchmark, whatever that benchmark might be. So that's really where they care. And on the FOMO side, I mean, there is this old story going back to like I don't know mid 2000s where Harvard stopped investing with Accel, the big Silicon Valley firm. They were mad at Accel for something they had done in terms of kind of splitting some funds and not giving money back. They were mad and they wanted to make a big point of not investing. So the next fund for Accel, the one that Harvard very loudly did not invest in is the one that seeded Facebook, right? So that didn't work out very well for them. So you know there the FOMO thing is real. I will say I mean you asked one of you asked about the crossovers earlier. I mean that there is this part of the market right the Fidelities the T. Rowe Prices of the world and the reason they're investing largely in these companies isn't for the return necessarily on those startup stocks. It's to have a nice foothold if and when the company does go public, right? To have a relationship with the company. So then they can take a really big position then they can get their mutual fund clients and their high net worth clients access into the IPO.
So is that more context to talk to their clients so a Fidelity has a bunch of high net worth individuals with accounts and they can say hey we've been investing in this company while they were private so we can bring a more confident thesis to bear or.
No, I think it's literally access. I think it's literally access. I think what this often means is because they have a relationship and if you've got a very you know if you've got an issuer that's oversubscribed for an IPO it's a very popular IPO the company's got to make decisions who gets an allocation of what those allocations are and what if you're Fidelity or T. Rowe what you really want is to be able to go to your existing clients and say we've you know we've got you've got access to the OpenAI IPO if you want it do you want it and then the client's like oh you know they had access to OpenAI I like these guys I'm going to stick with them etc that's what they want they want the relationship and they want and they can say to the CEO, 'Look, we believed in you six years ago. Of course, we still believe in you today. We're a long-term investor.'
So, talk about the IPO market. Is it over or are we back?
It's slow. I mean, if you look, I mean, despite the fact there was this little boom in January in terms of both number of pricings, in terms of filings, we're down over 20% in both of those year-over-year from last year, which was a garbage year for IPOs. Yeah. So, everybody is looking at the big dogs, right? Everybody's looking at SpaceX. Coming sooner. Everybody's looking at potentially OpenAI or Anthropic. I think Databricks is another one that people are sleeping on. That's almost certainly going to come in the second half of this year. So, I think what we might end up with is a really skewed IPO market. You know, the dollar numbers are going to look good because you're going to have some huge ones, but you're not necessarily going to have an enormous number of actual issuers, at least at this moment. I mean, yeah, it's pretty dead. We've got one coming tonight. That's all for the week.
Is that because who's tonight? Oh,
tonight something called Mini, not a venture-backed startup. It's a diabetes management spin out of Medtronic.
Is that because like you sort of have some sort of liquidity premium for the first name to go out in a category like
Core gets out and there's like the one public neocloud, and so that puts like the bar goes a lot higher for the next three neoclouds to get out. Something like that. I mean, I would like to think that that was a good argument, or that it's that much. I think it's really a vibes thing and a cowardice thing. Kind of been writing this story now for three years, which is these companies are scared to go public. Bankers are scared to necessarily bring them. Even though bankers are coin-operated and IPOs are good for them, they're a little bit scared of having a lousy IPO and then having a bad reputation off of it. And also a lot of them are spending a lot of time on SpaceX because there's a lot of money in that for them. No, I think people are scared. They're scared, you know, what if this doesn't work? It's going to be a lot more work. There's going to be a lot more scrutiny on us. And I think folks have just been terrified of going public for years, and I don't think that's necessarily changed.
Yeah. Well, and of course, the choppiness of the market this year, the SaaS apocalypse narrative, all sorts of stuff.
But this is the problem, right? There's going to be choppiness every year, right? You know, last April you obviously had the Liberation Day stuff. Now you have a war, you have the SaaS. There's always going to be a reason to not go public. And I think a lot of people take that reason. You know, there's always something. Yeah.
