I see multiple journalists on the horizon. We're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Right. That's misinformation. Monkey clearing order inbound. That's just wrong.
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That's better. That's better. UAV online. Blades. Double blades. Triple blades. Double kill. Five kill. Wrong. Come, get up. Blades. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blades. That's just wrong. Right. Monkey clearing order inbound.
Come, get up. We're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Trust the experts. Monkey clearing order inbound. Five kill. Founder known.
You're watching TVPN. Today's Friday, May 1st, 2026.
We are just barely live from the TVP Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We had to rush back from Stripe Sessions, fantastic interview with the Collison brothers, many others yesterday. Go check it out if you haven't already.
Uh, fun stuff. We didn't go nearly deep enough on the whole Coasean singularity. There's a debate on the timeline about it. We can get into it later. Uh, yeah, we need to have some more economists on the show to break it down for us. Uh, but this is their big pitch: firms get smaller in the future, the Coase theory of the firm, anyway. If you studied economics, you might be familiar. But uh, it's jargon, and you're going to be hearing a lot more of it. A whole lot of mumbo jumbo.
I'm not even going to try. I'm not even going to try, Jordi. Well, here's some uh, here's some less mumbo jumbo.
Uh, tech earnings, quad kill, recap, four in one day. Uh, last time this happened, I think it was 2020, four big tech companies all same day. It is random. No one really knows why. Uh, it just sort of lines up. It's like a solar eclipse.
Can you use astrology to predict the next one? Potentially. Potentially. You would have to imagine it's something around the alignment of the planets that causes the...
More like the holidays, because books close, then certain things line up. Also, like Nvidia is never in the conference call. They're always like two or three weeks later. But anyway, uh, let's go through what actually happened. Google was the big winner. They absolutely crushed the stock, up 10% in the last couple days, really successful. Uh, and there's a few reasons. Uh, so, the core business still growing. Google search, this was the question of is AI, are chatbots going to be eating into the core Google search revenue, the core business that drives all the other investments? The answer is unequivocally no. Uh, Google search and other revenue was 60.4 billion.
Yeah, uh, up 19% year over year. I mean, two years ago, there was the whole like Google search is dead thesis. Uh, that has not been borne out, at least this year. Uh, very, very strong results there. Then Google Cloud is like the major story. So much so that uh, Tech Him, when he uh, did his earnings recap, he didn't even talk about top lines at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. He just says Google Cloud revenue 63% year over year, Amazon Web Services 28% year over year, Azure 40% year over year, and then Meta overall revenue, which we'll get into, 33% year over year. So, he's not even looking at the rest of the business. All that matters for the three major public clouds um, are those cloud businesses. Uh, not even uh, anything specific uh, within the overall business.
So, uh, long story short, higher CapEx at Google totally justified in a world of cloud acceleration. Backlog growth is huge. Uh, cloud backlog uh, nearly doubled to more than 460 billion dollars. And importantly, this isn't like a 5-year, 10-year contract type thing. Half of that, more than half of that backlog is expected to be recognized in the next 24 months. So, really good news there. Uh, Google Cloud hit 20 billion, up 63%. Now, it is smaller than Amazon, and that's why AWS is uh, is, you know, people are hunting for high 20 growth rates, maybe it starts with a three. Uh, in Google, it's smaller, so it can grow 63%, but that's still fantastic. And uh, cloud operating income was 6.6 billion, which is very strong margin. So, everything is looking good, search durability, demand for AI infrastructure. It's the full stack AI play right now.
Uh, Microsoft showed solid execution, but they didn't dramatically change any particular narrative. I think a lot of this goes to like the just naturally slow deployment of enterprise AI, but this is the focus for Microsoft. They are the enterprise AI uh, play. So...
One thing was notable is they weren't heavily teasing anything related to the next Gemini uh, release. Yeah, I, they wouldn't tease that at earnings. They have historically. So, uh, anyways, uh, maybe they want to let the model speak for itself. Yeah, probably announce Gemini 4, I would imagine. Uh, announced it uh, or a coding specific model. Yeah, yeah, something there. I mean, there's certainly demand for it. They have the capacity. There's lots of opportunity. Uh, we'll probably be following that in three weeks when Google I/O happens.
So, Microsoft. Uh, investors wanted to see Azure growth, Copilot adoption, and a solid justification for all the CapEx. Uh, the stock's down 2%, nothing crazy, but uh, Microsoft beat on headline numbers. Revenue was 82.9 billion, up 18% year over year. Uh, and from an analyst perspective, it was a clean beat. Um, but there's more nuance here. So, in terms of AI adoption, Microsoft added... Look at this beautiful LED wall down there.
Yeah, let's give it up for the... Still underrated. We ordered this bad boy maybe like six months ago. Took a while. But it is fun. We need to figure out more things to do with it. Um, we uh, so...
Uh, on Copilot adoption, this is the big question. So, for Microsoft 365, like total seats, you know, you think about Microsoft Teams, Outlook, like the standard Microsoft enterprise seat. I think it's about $30 per user per month. Competes with uh, Google Apps enterprise, right? But Microsoft's been doing this for much longer. They have 450 million paid seats. So, in terms of Copilot, they added 5 million, which is great. They're at 20 million now. So, that's a solid adoption, but it's still small compared to the 450 paid seats. Ideally, like every seat would have a Copilot alongside of it. That, I mean, that's the idea, right? Uh, and so, the question is, how quickly can they get that 20 million Copilot seats up to 200 million, 400 million, you know, ideally everyone has one of these add-on subscriptions, and that's lifting the overall business.
Uh, market reaction was a bit choppy uh, as the new OpenAI relationship gets digested. And so, there's two sides to the Microsoft OpenAI deal right now, of course. Uh, OpenAI is no longer limited to selling just through Azure. Azure no longer has exclusive access to OpenAI models. OpenAI is now available on AWS as well. And it cuts both ways. So, on one hand, uh, Microsoft, you know, they used to be the exclusive provider. If you're a sales guy at Microsoft on Azure, you're probably really excited to call somebody up and say, 'Hey, you want to use GPT 5.5? We're the only place in town. Like, you should come over here. You should migrate more of your infrastructure. You should be using Azure.' But, it was probably frustrating because a lot of people say, 'No, we're locked into AWS. We are stuck in that cloud, and we'd love to, but we'll just use the API directly, or we'll figure out some other workaround, but we're not moving.' Yeah, or people could be like, 'Yeah, we're open to trying it, but it'll take, you know, a couple quarters realistically to get ramped up.'
Yeah. And so, from an Azure perspective, losing exclusivity is a negative, but from a business perspective, uh, the more growth for OpenAI is good for Microsoft's equity stake in the company. And so, these two tensions, like the capital balance sheet side of the business versus the Azure sales and acceleration side of the business, like these two... Not to mention Copilot versus Codex. Sure. Yeah. And so, these two sides of the business are sort of uh, butting up against each other, and Satya Nadella ultimately has to go and renegotiate the contract, and they did, and it seems like they're in a good place because uh, a lot of people were sort of saying like, 'Oh, well, is this going to get messy? Is there going to be some lawsuit here?' It seems like there was a very clean negotiation, renegotiation, and uh, OpenAI got rid of the AGI clause that allows them to stop sharing models, but they are sharing revenue, and uh, like the overall deal is basically...
The, I think 2032 end date. Yeah. For the IP share instead of this like arbitrary... Yep. AGI.
Uh, so, over at Amazon, Amazon still, of course, the CapEx king. They top the CapEx forecast. Uh, but, as scary as that would be, AWS is reaccelerating, and so, that's very good news. So, uh, the stock moved slightly upwards. Uh, Q1 2026 sales for Amazon overall were 181.5 billion for the quarter. For the quarter, they're on track to make a trillion in revenue soon. Um, up 17% year over year, beating expectations. AWS is expected to see 25% growth. That was the expectation, 25%. That's sort of where they've been. They came in at 28%. So, they beat on AWS growth, and that's really, really important, especially for their scale. This was very good news. Uh, the ads business is still cooking. Uh, churned out 17.2 billion dollars in revenue, and the chips business just crossed 20 billion run rate, which is very, very good. And they have big deals. AWS is in this interesting position, less of this like Google pure play full stack, and more focused on uh, working with both OpenAI and Anthropic at this point. And so, that all justifies more investments in training and AI infrastructure broadly, and the market seems to like it. Huge CapEx numbers, but reasonable response from the market and the stock.
So, Meta. Meta had a rough go. Huge drop, nearly 10% down following earnings. It's sort of jumping up and down, but uh, the core business uh, was extremely strong. So, Q1 revenue was uh, 56.3 billion, up 33% year over year. So, high growth for the overall business. Um, ad impressions rose 19%. Average price per ad rose 12%. They raised the CapEx outlook from uh, this... They have this range. It's within 10 billion dollars of 125. They added 10 billion to both. So, instead of saying, 'Hey, we'll be between 115 and 135,' now they're saying, 'We're going to be between 125 and 145.' Now, will they actually get more compute for that, or is that just a reflection of rising prices for all the inputs that go into compute spending? That's a big debate because there's one bull case where, 'Oh, they're optimistic. They're going to buy more compute.' But, it's like, 'No, there's a possibility they're just spending more to get the same amount of compute as they thought.' But, the big problem for shareholders, the big answer is it's not as clean of a...
Can you imagine? Just take one second and imagine that Meta's a private company, and their pitch is that we make AI agents for uh, selling products, and they're doing 200 billion dollars... They're at a 200 billion dollar run rate, growing 33% a year. Yeah. How's it priced? 20 trillion? Probably. Probably. With those operating margins? Yeah. I'm joking. Uh, it truly is one of the most incredible businesses of all time. But, they don't have the cloud thing. Yeah, yeah, they don't have the cloud thing. People are... he's kind of acting like the most AGI-pilled CEO, like hype hyperscaler CEO, right?
Yeah. Um, he was talking about like basically talking about like RSI on the earnings call. He's like, 'It's not just about like code, you know, coding.' Like he really seemingly believes, and he doesn't want to be in a position where someone else has actual superintelligence and he does not.
Yeah. And so, and that's just like a little bit too fuzzy because when you look at the rest of the market right now, it's like productivity tools. Yeah. Right? And so, the market just like can't really read into it. Yeah. And they're just kind of like not even giving him full credit for the business that he has.
Yeah. And I forget if he has ever mentioned the idea of selling tokens, selling AI infrastructure, getting in the cloud market, but it's way easier for an AWS... He loosely mentioned that last year when he was like starting to ramp stuff up, like basically saying like maybe we could do this at some point. Yeah. Because it's way easier to justify the CapEx at Amazon when you say, 'Oh, well, like, you know, if you know, regardless of how this market plays out, maybe Anthropic takes some of the compute, maybe OpenAI takes the compute, maybe there's a whole bunch of new uh, AI labs that take compute, maybe we'll use it for our services, our own models. If models commoditize, it's still valuable. If they don't, it's still valuable. There's a whole bunch of different ways to shift that CapEx around and justify it.' Meta, it's got to show up in the AI figures. It's got to show up in the ad business, at least right now.
Uh, and so, there are questions about how the big CapEx spend feeds back into cash flow when the company doesn't have a platform with big enterprise AI contracts, massive RPO figures. There's not an easy place to just like stuff compute necessarily, and at least get uh, you know, a market standard uh, like return on investment. Um, of course, they could spin up reselling. They could become a neo cloud or something like that, but uh, at their scale, it's a whole new host of challenges if they go that direction, and I think that that's not the plan. I think you're dialing into it that they aren't in fact uh, recursive self-improvement pilled at this point.
Um, and so, the other sort of uh, tremor in the system was the fact that daily active people, which is something that they were... It's not users anymore. It's DAP, daily active people, uh, declined sequentially since the first time that Meta began reporting the metric. So, less people were using Meta platforms uh, this quarter than previously. Um, but, they had some good explanations for it. They said that there were internet disruptions in Iran and WhatsApp restrictions in Russia. And so, this was not representative of real change in internet user behavior, and I think we all uh, recognize that that is reality in the sense that there's not some up-and-coming social network that's eating Meta Platforms family of apps for lunch, right? Like the TikTok threat came and sort of went. The Snapchat threat came and sort of went.
Sora. Sora came and went, right? And so, there was a different post I saw that uh, social media use is declining, especially among young people, but it was already so high, it's not really showing up in the data.
It will truly be insane if we get this new alien technology. We get LLMs, which in digital form can uh, convince you that they're a person, yeah, and we end up getting no new big social platforms. Like... Might just strengthen the current ones. Well, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's a base case right now, but it's still wild. I think you would expect... I think again, if you rewind to like 2020, and you said, 'Hey, we're going to have this technology where you can effectively have a digital twin of yourself,' you would think that somebody would figure out some new use case mechanism. I continue to think it just strengthens the incumbents. Roblox, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, like these platforms will just get more content on them that will probably be LLM-generated, LLM-enhanced. Yeah, if it's not LLM-written or developed, it's, you know, a creator taking less time doing other boring things and spending more time on their core output. So, uh, we'll keep tracking it.
Um, so, overall, what did we learn this earnings season? One possible takeaway is that there's a little bit of a fracturing in the overall AI narrative. Big number, biggest deals, just grow, grow, grow. Now, every hyperscaler reports a big CapEx number, but each company does have a different story. So, Google's the full stack platform, Microsoft's focused on enterprise adoption and distribution, Amazon's most aggressive on infrastructure and partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. They have the cleanest, less... it's a less competitive relationship with Anthropic and OpenAI because they don't have the DeepMind equivalent necessarily.
Meta is all about ad optimization, and Meta is also this interesting like high-risk option on frontier AI. Like it's possible that if TBD Labs MSL, if that pays off, you wind up getting an OpenAI-sized or Anthropic-sized business out of it in the oligopoly world where they have a breakthrough, they get to something that's 55 or 47 level and then they're competing at an equal level and they're playing in that oligopoly. And so, you like the Meta traders are sort of, or the investors are sort of weighing both of those sides. You have a very solid ads business and then you have this call option on potential frontier AI, which is still early but showing some really solid signs. So, the market likes short-term revenue evidence right now, and there's still many strategies that will play out over the rest of the year, but this quarter was focused on can you justify your CapEx this quarter. And so, we'll keep following it.
Let's go over the timeline and see what people were saying. The headline numbers, of course, were huge. Cloud growth, AWS 28%, GCP 63%, Azure at 40%. Absolutely massive numbers. Remember, people were hoping for GCP to be at 40% and it went up 63%. Absolutely massive. AWS, people were hoping for 30, they got 28, not too bad. Um, Take him, we mentioned. You can go subscribe to his Substack at takehim.substack.com. He has a write-up on the state of AI after Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft earnings. And Take him's been right a lot lately. He's been doing well.
Uh, and there's some people reflecting on, you know, crazy run-ups, crazy numbers, crazy hype. Is this the dot-com bubble? Always fun to go back and comp to previous bubbles. The dot-com one is still fresh for a lot of people because some people in tech were alive during it. Many people in tech were alive during it. But this poster Ren is comparing the price-to-earnings multiples today versus the dot-com boom. So, today's MAG 4 PE ratios, the companies that reported earnings, Meta's at 16x price-to-earnings, Google's at 17x, Amazon's at 24, and Microsoft's at 25 price-to-earnings ratio. Compare that to during the dot-com. Microsoft was at 73x, Cisco was at 200x plus, Yahoo was trading at 800x earnings. The Nasdaq as a whole traded at 200 times earnings during the peak of the dot-com bubble. Today's bubble is trading at 16 to 25x earnings on companies generating hundreds of billions of dollars in real cash flow. Now, they're drawing down on that cash flow, but even in some bizarre world where, you know, AI is a bubble and it's fake and we all go back to pencil and paper, uh, we'll probably go back to digital advertising and spreadsheets and the cloud and, you know, SaaS and all of these companies will still benefit and be in fantastic position.
The only thing that's, you know, or one thing that's imperfect with these comparisons is uh, when you look at like the peak, you can say like, okay, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have relatively reasonable PE ratios, but if you look at the rest, uh, you look at all the companies that have been started in the last like 5 years, especially in the private markets that have been marked up from, you know, 20 to 100 to 500 to a billion and beyond, many of them have absolutely no earnings.
Yeah. And so, you have to look at like maybe something more like a Yahoo as like a decent comp, right? Where Yahoo was trading at peak at 800x. And there is some pushback in the replies here. Reasonis forces, AMD's at 130, Tesla's at 350, Palantir's at 220, and Intel is at 900 times earnings. I know. So, it's like very, very convenient to just take four of the greatest companies ever in the history of the world and say like, there's no bubble. Like, they're reasonably priced.
Yeah. I think it is useful to go back to the fact that like there's a lot of hype in tech, but what's driving the vast majority of the market cap right now is still fairly low PE companies. Like Intel is so much smaller on a market cap basis than Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta that even if you're overpaying on earnings for that, you like the overall market is anchored to a pretty decent earnings engine still. And that's like the bull case here. Um, what else is going on? I'm missing...
Uh, George Hotz is back with a white coat. What'd he say? May 1st, he says, AI will create jobs. He says, it's nice to see Jensen talk about this and it's super obvious when you think about it. AI and immigration are fundamentally the same. There's new people showing up and hopefully everyone understands how and why immigration creates jobs. Wants are effectively unlimited. It's classic Jevons paradox that if we make something more efficient, we end up using more of it. Or a cool aphorism I learned at Facebook, if you make the site 10% faster, people spend 5% more total time on it.
He worked at Facebook for... he was like an indie... he was part of the machine. Now, just like you get the wah-wah crying people about how immigration lowers wages for native-born Americans and we got to keep the hardworking immigrants out because you have some right to be lazy or something, you'll get this about AI. AI will outcompete some humans at some jobs. But protectionism is for losers. The important thing is that the overall pie grows and inequality stays somewhat in check, not by redistribution, but by design. There will be more to do than ever before. More to do than ever before.
Can we pull up this video of Jensen? Yeah, let's do it. In the production chat for you. Yo, you have it? Yeah, we can play it. Great. I'm excited for Eric Seufert's deep dive here. We'll get into that later. The Seufernator? The Seufernator. And reminder, we have the Isaacanator coming on in just 7 minutes. Mike Isaac has been covering the Elon Musk versus Twitter trial.
Is it like a 4-day work week with trials? It is. Living in the future? It is. Wait, wait, wait. So, can we pull up this screenshot? Because did you read Mike Isaac's full thread on his experience covering the trial? Did you read the whole thing? Because he's been live tweeting it and it's very funny because he will post... So, we got to zoom in here. This is a... Did you turn this into an... into an infographic. So, this is a minute-by-minute chronological log of off-topic / personal / minor inconvenience moments because Mike Isaac will talk about, oh, Elon Musk just said this on the stage. Oh, the lawyer fired back with this. The jury said this. The judge said that, right? But then in between that, he has been logging very, very minor inconveniences that he's experienced. So, he talks about his lunch, the roasted tomato and corn pizza. He says he forgot a pillow for his butt to sit on.
What? He said he... Corn pizza? I don't know. Uh, he said he bought a water thing. At 16:07:45, this is transcribed from X, so I think the times are in UTC or something. He brought a water bottle but forgot to fill it in the rush for a seat. Now he's increasingly thirsty during an intense moment of testimony. Someone's laptop suddenly blasted a loud YouTube video in the gallery. This is a garden hose nozzle, it said. Courtroom mishap. So, he's going through it all. It's very fun to track his. And we'll dig into his experience both in the court and actually with what's going on with the case. But let's play this Jensen clip. This sounds fun. Uh, Jensen is insisting that jobs will be created in the future. Let's see it. What does he have to say?
Um, the things that are said are very counterproductive and in fact hurtful. Uh, on the one hand, maybe a scientist thinks that by warning people that AI is going to completely permeate and proliferate across radiology and therefore radiologists are going to get wiped out. Um, on the one hand, that might be considered warning and therefore helpful, but in fact, the counter would have been hurtful. If we convinced everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society. Um, it is hurtful if we convince all the young college graduates to not be software engineers and it turns out the United States needs more software engineers than ever. That's hurtful. Um, and so, we have to be mindful of how we communicate the importance of this technology and what it's able to do um, to advocate for policy and advocate for guardrails on the one hand. On the other hand, uh, scaring people with things like saying nonsensical things which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat to humanity. There's 20% chance that it's existential. That's ridiculous. Uh, that it's going to wipe out 50% of new college grad jobs. That it's going to completely destroy democracy. I mean, these kind of comments are not helpful. They're not based... They're made by...
He's subtweeting in real life. He's not vague posting. He's subtweeting. I do think the 50% numbers are so funny because it's like 50/50 is like the most neutral you can be about some prediction. It feels like... I mean, I get that it's not... in that case it's like 50% of jobs, but whenever you issue like a 50/50 proclamation, it sort of tells you nothing. Like we were looking at like the prediction markets on the trial and we were like, 'Oh, it's 50/50. Okay, so that actually doesn't give me any information about what's going to happen in the future.' And it's very easy to make a prediction that's like, 'Oh, I predict this will happen. 50/50.' And then if it doesn't happen, you can be like, 'Well, yeah, 50% chance it wasn't going to happen.' Like I had it really high that it wasn't going to happen. And then you can also say, you know, I predicted it.
Um, yeah, and so it is truly universal when we talk to these companies that are building AI products or selling AI products. Um, it seems like the ambition level in every single industry is just going up. Even Gabe from Rogow was saying, 'Yeah, there's an opportunity to cut costs or there's an opportunity to get aggressive and like take market share.' Yep. And he said like a lot of firms are saying like, 'Let's just do more work. Let's grow our revenue. Let's take on more clients, right?' And so it is um, it's harder and harder to doom about the job market. Yeah.
Do you need to doom about the task market? If you're... It's over for tasks. Tasks are getting automated. No, I'm serious. Like there are tasks that like the reading of the X-ray or whatever it was, the radiologist scan. What did they actually read? Is that an X-ray that they're looking for tumors in? You know what I'm talking about, right? The famous Hinton... Yeah, I don't know if it's technically an X-ray. It's not, right? It's a CAT scanner or something. It's some scan where you can look at the brain. Yeah, a scan, and of course image generation and image models are very good at detecting cancers, but that is just one of several tasks, many tasks that a radiologist does throughout the day. And so radiologists are currently making more money than ever and they are in more demand than ever.
And I was telling you before the show about truck drivers. Um, they don't just drive the truck. There was a survey that said 70% of them carry weapons because they are effectively security guards for the truck, as well as probably a bunch of other things that you don't think about, light repairs on the truck, you know, stopping for different things, rearranging things in the back, making sure that the load is like balanced and whatnot. It's like kids in the car. Purely just yes. Driving with kids in the car and you drive by a big truck on a road trip, you can go like this. Yes. And then that's another thing that the self-driving truck driver... do. A computer could never look out the window and see some kids in the car and honk. But well, yeah, I mean we'll see.
Anyway, we have Mike Isaac in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. He's at the New York Times. Mike, how you doing? Yo, what's up? Good to see you. Great to see you. So wait, so what's up with... Yeah, so four-day work week? Are they living in the future? Yeah. Is this universal basic vacation days?
It's court is incredible in that I got to sleep in to like 9:00 a.m. today, which was great. But I made up for it because like literally every day this week I've gotten up at 5:00 in the morning to get my cold ass down to the Oakland courthouse and stand outside for 2 hours. So I don't know, but it's fun. It's pretty fun.
How does it work? Who gets priority? Is it first come first serve? Like if some random person shows up before you, they can just get it and then you're just out? Or do you get to like show some sort of like press... like how does it work? Yeah, I wish I was cool enough to like cut. Well, here's the thing. Get an artist pass. VIP pass. No, not VIP. Artist pass. It's a level above. Okay, I understand.
So there are 20 uh, reserved seats in the front row for press, but the issue is uh, only one person per outlet gets it, and we are doing like live blogging for like the big moments like opening statements and for Elon. And so myself and my colleague Cade came the whole first week. And so we've had to trade off. He's gotten the like press skip the line thing and I've been with um, the other folks in the 30 unreserved seats in the back and I can't even see anything.
Yeah, yeah, oh my god. Or literally... Or straight sessions. Literally a dude fell asleep. I was actually impressed. Yeah. It seemed pretty entertaining. Didn't seem like you were falling asleep. I was keeping up through the live blog. You reading my nightmares Twitter too? It's been fun, honestly. Have you guys ever done like court case things or have you ever been sued or been in court? Uh, never been in court. I went to mock court in high school where everyone picks a role. I think I was... Yeah, we larped in court, literally larping in high school. But other than that, never.
The whole, this whole time it seems insane. Like with the recent NASA the moon mission, I was like this should be a live stream plus a pay-per-view for the key moments. For this trial, it's like we have huge budget deficits and we have these incredible media products. Why are we not doing pay-per-views, right? But uh, wait, that's the funny thing. I was just going to say that's the funny thing about like federal courthouse stuff. Like there's a lot of different rules around filming electronics. I covered some cases in DC and I can't even bring a laptop or phone in those courthouses. So like this is actually a very permissive judge just because she believes in like press access and stuff and we've had way more access than you would normally get in federal court cases.
Okay, so you've been to these court cases before, but if I follow your Twitter, it feels like you're making a bunch of rookie mistakes. You only had egg bites at 5:30 a.m., your bite energy is wearing off, you forgot your butt pillow, you forgot to fill your water bottle. Like is this amateur hour or are you professional? What's going on? I think you guys might know me well enough that that is kind of how I operate most of my life. Like kind of chaotic, but I focus on the important stuff. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean look, I can file. I may be like bleeding and hungry like limping across the finish line, but we're getting... I'm tweeting for you.
What is your... what are some like high profile cases that stand out that you've covered in the past? So I got to do... let's see. My first one was insanely boring but important. The Apple versus Samsung thing back in the day and like them suing for Samsung copying like literally everything they do. Um, I did Dallas actually, Zuckerberg's like I think maybe one of his first testimonies on the stand when ZeniMax was suing Meta for the Oculus acquisition. You remember that? Yeah. Palmer Luckey. That was in Dallas. That was super fun. That I almost got kicked out of the courtroom for tweeting.
And then I did the DC FTC Meta one and I almost got kicked out of the courtroom again. Actually, I did get kicked out of the courtroom for wearing the Meta Ray-Bans. These are not it. Interesting. But I wore the Meta Ray-Bans and then they started putting... I was super stupid for doing it. But then they started putting signs up saying, 'Do not wear these glasses in court.' But you weren't... you were just using them as glasses or you were being sneaky and you were recording? No, I was like, 'Look, I can't record. I won't record.' I was trying to play by the rules. And like they are my prescription glasses. Yeah, but the bailiff... The bailiff was like... It's too much, it's too high risk for them. Because you could have like turned off the light or whatever. Yeah.
Uh, talk about the fans. Are there really Elon Musk fans in the courtroom? Like what motivates someone to go and watch that live? Is this their UFC front row ticket? Like why are they there? Uh, so you guys would have fun. Like it actually is... A lot of court cases are boring to people who don't care about this stuff, right? Like you and I may be super into... Like the FTC trial was super fun for me because it's like, 'Oh my god. Mark Zuckerberg emailing Sheryl Sandberg and talking about Path.' Like this is incredible. And like the average person has no idea what we're talking about. But this is like a circus. There are people who genuinely love Elon or are genuinely worried about the end of the world happening. Um, and I think it's a really good thing that there's public access to these courts. Like I think the average person can come in and show up. And that's what I think after the buzz of Twitter and like people seeing that this is an event, we got much longer lines and like folks who are local, like just like I know a PM in tech from Meta that came. I know like a guy from Box made it in. Uh, just if you get there early enough and get a seat, you can just hang out. It's like... and I think it's really great. I think it's great that people are, yeah, are there for it, you know? It shouldn't just be me. Yeah.
What about the jury? Does the jury seem excited and honored to have the opportunity to be part of a case like this or are they nodding off? It'd be so funny to be like so off the internet all the time that you're like, 'Sam who? Who like... Sam. This guy Sam and Greg and this guy who makes cars and I don't even know what they're talking about, a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo.' Like there's got to be one person on the jury that was just so not tapped in that they're just confused.
I think jury selection was super interesting for that. I can't say too much about the jury right now because like there's all these rules about... Like some random person could go up to them and if you identify them or try to alter it. Totally. But I will say like during jury selection on Monday, it is an incredible slice of life and you get like how familiar or unfamiliar people are with the tech industry despite being here, you know? Like some folks are like, 'I have no idea what you're talking about. I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what AI is. I don't know what AGI stands for.' So it really... it really played, and voir dire and jury selection is so important for cases like this. Just it makes the dynamic of the facts don't necessarily always matter but the vibe can really matter, which I think is a benefit for Elon honestly.
Were they trying to weed out... they were trying to weed out people that are a little bit too excited about the case, right? You want the people that are like... in order to have a... but then talk... I didn't understand why is the jury just like giving like an advisory decision? What is the history of like why do you have a jury when the judge is ultimately going to make the final call? It feels like just kind of putting on like a show because like...
Theoretically, the judge could just sit through a bunch of depositions and make a call.
