TBPN

Apple-Intel Chip Deal, U.S Adds 115K Jobs, DeepSeek Eyes $50B Valuation | Diet TBPN

34 min
May 9, 202622 days ago
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Summary

This episode analyzes the divergence between the AI-driven economy and the broader U.S. economy, covering Intel's 20% stock surge on an Apple chip deal, stronger-than-expected job growth of 115K in April, and the concentration of market gains in a handful of mega-cap tech companies. The hosts explore the K-shaped recovery within the real economy, examining winners like Six Flags and losers like Whirlpool, while discussing geopolitical implications of U.S. chip manufacturing resiliency and DeepSeek's $50B valuation.

Insights
  • The stock market is driven by extreme concentration in AI-related mega-cap stocks (MAG-10 now represents 40% of market), creating dual economic anxiety: fear of both AI-driven unemployment and bubble collapse leading to recession
  • The real U.S. economy shows surprising resilience with 115K job additions across non-AI sectors (retail, healthcare, transportation) despite tech layoffs, suggesting the AI economy and traditional economy are decoupling
  • Within the real economy, there's a K-shaped divide where discretionary experiences (Six Flags) are thriving while durable goods manufacturers (Whirlpool) are struggling due to deferred purchases and global competition
  • Government intervention through Commerce Secretary Lutnick's diplomacy successfully consolidated Intel partnerships with Apple, NVIDIA, and SpaceX, demonstrating strategic importance of domestic chip manufacturing to national security
  • Chinese AI competition is accelerating with DeepSeek's founder personally investing $3B (40% of $7.5B round) to own 90% of the company, signaling aggressive compute acquisition strategy to catch up on frontier models
Trends
Geopolitical reshoring of semiconductor manufacturing driven by U.S. government policy and supply chain diversification away from TaiwanExtreme market concentration in AI mega-caps creating systemic risk and divergence from underlying economic fundamentalsK-shaped recovery within the real economy with experiential/discretionary sectors outperforming durable goods and necessitiesChinese AI founders deploying personal capital at massive scale to compete with U.S. frontier models through compute acquisitionDual anxiety in markets: simultaneous fear of AI disruption causing unemployment and AI bubble collapse causing recessionSoftware investment acceleration (23% growth) alongside hardware/chip investment (43% growth) in tech equipment spendingLabor market bifurcation between employed workers 'clinging on' and job seekers 'frozen out' despite headline job growthCompute as a strategic commodity with SpaceX/Anthropic partnership demonstrating willingness to overcome corporate tensions for infrastructure access
Topics
Companies
Intel
Stock up 20% on preliminary chip manufacturing agreement with Apple; undergoing revitalization under CEO Lip Bhutan w...
Apple
Pursuing dual-source chip strategy with Intel to reduce TSMC dependence and address supply chain constraints affectin...
NVIDIA
Invested $5B in Intel; partnering for custom data center CPUs; benefiting from AI economy concentration with stock gains
TSMC
Facing capacity constraints from surging AI chip demand; losing leverage with Apple as primary customer due to NVIDIA...
DeepSeek
Chinese AI company raising $7.5B at $50B valuation with founder personally contributing $3B; aggressively acquiring c...
SpaceX
Announced TerraFab project; partnering with Anthropic on compute infrastructure; benefiting from government push for ...
Anthropic
Securing compute partnership with SpaceX despite prior tensions with Elon; competing with Grok and other AI models
Whirlpool
Cut dividend for first time since 1950s despite 100+ years of consistent payments; stock down 80% in 5 years due to d...
Six Flags
Reporting higher Q1 revenue and attendance growth despite economic uncertainty; stock recovered since November invest...
Samsung Electronics
Competing with Intel and TSMC in chip manufacturing; mentioned as alternative supplier for Apple memory and storage
Oracle
Ellison family holds infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle while owning legacy media through Warner Brothers
OpenAI
Subject of ongoing federal trial with Elon Musk regarding board ousting in November 2024; Sam Altman's text messages ...
Tesla
Mentioned in context of Elon's chip sourcing strategy with Samsung for various Tesla chips
Datadog
Software company showing acceleration in revenue growth as part of broader SaaS bounce-back
Atlassian
Software company demonstrating meaningful revenue acceleration alongside other SaaS firms
DoorDash
Example of network effects company that had to answer to market during recent economic volatility
Warner Brothers
Legacy media company owned by Ellison family as counterbalance to AI infrastructure investments
Global Foundries
Mentioned as potential fab partner in discussions around Elon's chip sourcing strategy
Micron
Memory company included in AI Big Ten market concentration analysis alongside Mag-7 and other semiconductor leaders
Broadcom
Semiconductor company included in AI Big Ten market concentration analysis
People
Lip Bhutan
New Intel CEO vowing to revitalize design and foundry businesses; hired TSMC executive and restructured leadership
Tim Cook
Met repeatedly with Commerce Secretary Lutnick; blamed TSMC capacity constraints for inability to meet iPhone and Mac...
Elon Musk
Announced TerraFab project; partnering with Anthropic on compute; subject of OpenAI trial regarding board ousting
Jensen Huang
Invested $5B in Intel at $23/share; benefiting from AI economy concentration; met with Commerce Secretary on dual-sou...
Howard Lutnick
Key diplomat in bringing Apple, NVIDIA, and SpaceX into partnerships with Intel; met repeatedly with tech executives ...
Donald Trump
Personally advocated for Intel-Apple partnership; converted $9B in grants to Intel stock; raised concerns about CEO T...
Sam Altman
Subject of federal trial; text messages with Miramirati featured as evidence regarding board ousting
Weigen Lo
Former TSMC executive hired by Intel CEO Tan; hire prompted lawsuit from TSMC
Siobhan Zillis
Testified at OpenAI-Elon trial; left board in February 2023 before November ousting; referenced AI acceleration concepts
Helen Toner
Deposition video shown at OpenAI-Elon trial; testified about board ousting timeline
Miramirati
Deposition video featured at trial; text messages with Sam Altman shown as evidence regarding ousting
Travis Pastrana
Referenced for no-parachute skydiving stunt; metaphor for semiconductor investment risk
Travis Kelsey
Led $200M investment in Six Flags; stock recovered after initial decline
Mike Isaac
Covering OpenAI-Elon trial with media pass; splitting coverage with Cade Metz
Greg Ip
Published analysis disentangling AI economy growth (31%) from non-AI economy growth (0.1%)
Diane Swonk
Quoted describing labor market as 'high anxiety' with employed workers clinging on while job seekers frozen out
Ben Thompson
Mentioned as hoping for Intel revitalization alongside hosts
Josh Kushner
Example of barbell thesis investor with positions in both AI (OpenAI) and anti-AI (legacy media)
Ryan Peterson
Shared Financial Times chart illustrating bull case (GDP per capita north of $1M) vs. extinction scenario
Tyler
Co-host who attended OpenAI-Elon trial in Oakland; fasted during proceedings while taking notes
Quotes
"There's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that you need to puzzle together to get a picture of what's going on."
HostEarly in episode
"As soon as we went in, Apple went in, NVIDIA went in, a lot of smart people went in."
Donald TrumpMid-episode
"It's still a high anxiety job market. Those who have a job are clearly clinging on, while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out."
Diane Swonk, KPMGJobs report discussion
"If you can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin, then you're never going to get excited about it."
HostNapkin math discussion
"The AI economy grew 31%, while the non-AI economy just 0.1%."
Greg Ip, Wall Street JournalEconomic analysis section
Full Transcript
The great lock-in continues. We will go into a review of the last few days. It's Friday. We're having fun. We're going to be hanging out here on the stream telling you about the American Economic Roller Coaster. You've heard this story before. It's just non-stop. Okay, so the American Economic Roller Coaster. It's good to be back. We miss you guys. It's good to be back. Yeah, we've got a bunch of stuff going on. A whole bunch of economic news over the last couple days. stock market is absolutely ripping. We should be in white suits. Intel's up 20% today, so almost. And there's this split between the AI economy and the real economy, the American economy. And there's a whole bunch of different things that you need to puzzle together to get a picture of what's going on. And then I'm discovering that there are K-shapes within the K-shapes. Even in the real economy, there's a divide between different companies. And so I wanted to walk through that. So let's start with the Intel news. It's up almost 20% today on the news that they will be making chips for Apple. There's a report in the Wall Street Journal about this. They've reached a preliminary chip making agreement. It's not completely locked in, but there's a whole bunch of extra context here that we've been tracking for the last six months, 12 months, as some of this was expected. The revitalization of Intel was something that a lot of folks were clamoring for. Ben Thompson, myself, a lot of folks were all hoping for something and plans are starting to come together. So the talks have been described as intensive, intensive talks between the two companies have been ongoing. For more than a year, Apple's been talking to Intel. Interesting, of course, Intel and Apple have been long-term partners for the 90s, 2000s, up until the Apple Silicon program where they started going, Apple started going direct to TSMC. Can they get them back? It seems like potentially in some form factors, but we're going to dig into it. So They have hammered out a former deal in recent months, and it's still unclear which exact Apple products Intel would make chips for and manufacture them, both its own designs. So Intel has two main businesses. It's both a design shop and a manufacturer. They have a fab and a design unit. In its foundry unit, both businesses have been underperforming for years before Lip Bhutan came in as the new CEO and was vowing to revitalize them. And so last summer, the Trump administration struck a deal to convert nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel stock, giving the U.S. 10% stake. At roughly $20, $21 a share, it's now at $125 a share. So White House has got to be feeling pretty good. Yeah, huge. I mean, I'm pretty sure Jensen has made over a billion dollars on the $5 billion investment. I mean, just today, if it's up 20%, and he must have seen a big growth in that position since then. So just today, probably a one or two billion dollar print. And so the reporting here in the journal says that the Trump administration was actually key in bringing Apple to the table, putting pressure on sort of both sides to say, hey, let's think about the future of American manufacturing resiliency, reducing Taiwanese dependence on a foreign supply chain and giving Intel a real shot at underwriting the next big fad that they want to build. Nvidia got in at $23 a share with their $5 billion investments. So up. Round of 5X. Not bad. That's not bad at all. The guy really needed it. He paid for Grok with that. That's pretty sick. Oh, yeah. He just paid for Grok perfectly. That's why he wired before they actually closed. Yeah, he's like, I'm up. I got gains. I need to offset these. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has met repeatedly over the last year with high-ranking Apple officials, including CEO Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX chief Elon Musk, NVIDIA chief Jensen Wong, to try and convince them to get into business with Intel. There was a discussion about should NVIDIA dual source, the Grace CPUs from Intel, SpaceX, and Elon's been with Samsung for a lot of Tesla chips, but there's been discussion there. There was that rumor about global foundries, and Elon's always been in and around the fab world, and he's obviously going a lot deeper with the long-term TerraFab project. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnig was trying to convince them to get into business with Intel. Some of the people familiar with the matter said with the Apple deal, Intel is now signed. Partnerships with all three. So over the last decade, Intel fell badly behind rivals from the Wall Street Journal, such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics, after a series of technical mishaps, leadership changes, and failed attempts at consolidation led outside foundry customers to pull or curb their businesses. when Intel hired Tan in March of 2025, wow, just a year ago, to replace ousted chief executive pal Gessinger. President Trump raised concerns that Tan's close ties with China would compromise him and called for his ouster. It was a very, very dramatic moment, but Tan won Trump over with a charm offensive. I like that. And the government announced its 10% investment in Intel shortly after. Following the investment, Intel shares price rose sharply. On Friday morning, it rose 7.5% to an all-time high of nearly $118 per share. It's up more now. Tan has been reshaping Intel's top leadership ranks in recent months, including hiring former TSMC executive Weigen Lo, a move that prompted a lawsuit from TSMC. So they're not friends anymore. Intel's CEO has also ousted his head of product and hired new executives to lead the company's data center processor and client computing units, as well as newly formed custom silicon business. He's also invested heavily in Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 14A, And that is the node that Intel is hoping that all of the potential customers will jump together and say, hey, we're going to buy from this. If you make it, if you build it, we will come. President Trump personally advocated for Intel to cook in a meeting, which is funny because it sounds like he's advocating for Intel just to cook generally. But he's no, he's advocating for Intel to Tim Cook in a meeting at the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump said, I like Intel in January. He said that the government made tens of billions of dollars from Intel deal and that the government's backing of the company had attracted important partners to Intel. As soon as we went in, Apple went in, NVIDIA went in, a lot of smart people went in, Trump said. NVIDIA, the world's largest chip firm, invested $5 billion in Intel in September, and the two companies announced a partnership under which Intel would build custom data center CPUs, the processing brains for most computer systems for NVIDIA. And last month, Elon, of course, announced the TerraFab project. And so Apple relies on TSMC to make chips for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other devices, and is under pressure to find additional chip suppliers. There's also chip shortages, so it could be good to dual source, independent of the geopolitical discussion. On Apple's last two earnings conference calls, Cook blamed a lack of availability of advanced chips for Apple's inability to meet customer demands for iPhones. The constraints are expected to continue in the current quarter, affecting several Mac models, Cook said, quote, we think looking forward that the Mac mini and the Mac studio may take several months to reach supply demand balance. And after the earnings call, Apple raised the Mac mini starting price. And so TSMC's manufacturing capacities, capabilities far surpass those of Samsung and Intel, makers of other kinds of chips for memory and storage, for example, are more competitive with one another, giving Apple multiple sources of supply, although of course they are memory constrained. Apple's long been TSMC's top customer, but skyrocketing demand for its manufacturing capacity from NVIDIA and other designers of AI chips means Apple's no longer has as much leverage to secure the supplies that it needs. Starting in 2006, Apple used Intel-designed CPUs as its main processor of its personal computers, but switched to its own custom CPUs based on ARM design in 2020. That's the dawn of Apple Silicon. And so there's been an incredible economic and financial performance concentrated in just a handful of trillion-dollar tech companies. Intel's starting to join and starting to perform like that. There's a few memory stocks. I saw one report that referred to it as the MAG-10, and they'd added a few other AI names to that group. But there's just a few companies that are driving the vast majority returns in the stock market. We had three sort of beautiful weeks where pretty much everyone started saying, there's no way it's a bubble. Yeah. Look at the revenue growth. There's no way it's a bubble. But now people Steve over at Bloomberg we can pull this chart up The concentration in the market you can see the AI Big Ten So Mag7 plus AMD, Broadcom, and one other. Who is that? Micron. Now make up 40% of the market. Railroads, for reference, during 1835 to 1910 were 63% of the market. and he comps it to Japan, the Nifty Fifty, tech and telecom throughout various periods of time. And so I was reading this post by, or this piece by Greg Ipp in the Wall Street Journal, and he was trying to disentangle what's happening in the overall American economy from the AI economy, where is the growth coming from? He sort of back the envelope did. He said the AI economy grew 31%, while the non-AI economy just 0.1%. And he cites a few economic statistics that are recent. Personal consumption, the biggest component of GDP, grew a relatively muted 1.6%. Investment fell in housing, business structures. I think we're spending more in data centers than housing now or office buildings, I guess. I think it eclipsed office buildings and factories and transportation equipment like trucks and aircrafts. Meanwhile, investment soared 43% in tech equipment. Obviously, that's chips and GPUs. 23% in software, surprising. And 22% in data center. Yeah, SaaS has had a pretty meaningful bounce back. Certainly on the revenue side. Datadog, Atlassian. Yeah. There's been some acceleration. It really was extremely widespread where you had, I mean, you had like DoorDash and companies with strong network effects where the software was not their moat. They still had to go and answer to the market. And some of them got in and out of that in a week or a month, and some of them it took a quarter or two to show that there's resiliency. Some of them are still beaten down. But overall, you know, software is still doing very well. On the flip side, there's another headline that hit the journal yesterday. U.S. adds 115,000 jobs in April with solid hiring across sectors, retail, transportation, warehousing, and healthcare. All showed strong growth and led to expectation beating jobs growth. And so this is the weird dynamic that, you know, you're seeing all of this growth in the AI economy, and yet the overall employment is still chugging along. We can pull up the chart from the Wall Street Journal. But the U.S. job market blew past expectations in April, buoyed by gains in industries, industries, including retail, transportation, warehousing, health care. Not completely unexpected, given that those are not particularly AI-targeted areas, whereas you might see the layoffs in the tech community, but it's just not enough because the U.S. employs over 100 million people, and so a layoff of 4,000 people at some tech company just doesn't really move the needle when you're talking about overall. Breaking news from Gabe in the chat. Texas Roadhouse is up. What? Why? He says 20%. I'm seeing 15%. Why is it up so high? He says, you're not bullish enough on Texas Roadhouse. I have never been. Maybe they beat... Everyone says this is a Kiriakou filter. It really is. It's crazy how viral that meme format has gone. I thought that was just a thing that I sent to you because I'd be dying laughing about it. No, it's quite popular. Broken containment bully. The American economy added 115,000 jobs in April. This was down from a net gain of 185,000 jobs in March, but it was much better than what expectations were for April. Analysts polled by the Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs, and the real number came in more than twice that, which is like, it just breaks the narrative a lot. There is this disconnect between like the AI economy and the real economy. I was talking to Sagar about this. It's like in some ways, it's like AI is, NVIDIA earnings is holding up the global economy and it's holding up the global stock market. It's not actually holding up the economy. If you view the economy as all of the different jobs and activities that happen, even if there isn't incredible growth there, there's actually a surprising amount of strength and resiliency. So the unemployment rate stayed. I'm waiting to hit the gong until we see what the revisions come in at. We haven't seen any revisions from March this time. I don't know. It comes like over six months later. The April report coming in after strong job gains in March shows how the labor market is holding up better this year than last. While health care is still leading the way in job gains, other sectors now appear to be picking up. Businesses are seeing conditions stabilizing, and they have weathered the tariffs, so many are hiring. It's looking somewhat better than it did last year. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, says it's still a high anxiety job market. Those who have a job are clearly clinging on, while those who are looking for a job are feeling frozen out. I was digging into, you know, where is their strength within the real economy? Once you go outside of AI, what is going on? And there were two recent earnings reports that were sort of disconnected, but showed a little bit of the picture of what's going on. So it was Whirlpool and Six Flags, both had very different reports. So Whirlpool, you probably know from refrigeration and washing machines, dryers, that type of appliance. They've been making an appliance for over 100 years. And they've also been paying a dividend since the 1950s consistently. They've never suspended their dividend, even through all the Great Recession, the dot-com crash. Every year they've been able to pay that dividend. They just cut their dividend, which is a really, really big deal for this company since it's a dividend stock. The stock traded down on the news and the stock is down 80 percent of the past five years. And they're in some financial trouble. Like they have a lot of debt and they have a lot of competition. But you could play that as like, OK, the real economy is like completely chugging to a halt. At the same time, you had six flags, which should be the thing that is the most discretionary. Like, do you go to the roller coaster theme park or not? And Six Flags just reported higher first quarter revenue. They're growing and they're growing attendance and customer spending. And so now Six Flags, it's not exactly a juggernaut of business. It's only worth $2.3 billion. And the stock is down over the past two years, about 50%. But the business is growing and you wouldn't expect that during a time of like deep economic weakness. And so there's something odd going on there where as you think of refrigeration as extremely necessary. Roller coasters as the ultimate, like you don't, you can definitely skip it if you are cash strapped, but the actual dynamics of the market are very different. So Whirlpool sells big ticket necessities, these refrigerators, but they are deferrable. So you can put off getting a new refrigerator. You can repair an old refrigerator if money is tight, but your kids are only really roller coaster age for a limited time. And Whirlpool also faces brutal global competition and existing home sales are down 3% month over month. And so all of that drives fewer appliance upgrades and they are not necessarily a beneficiary of all the international competition that they face from LG and Samsung and other international players. And so I've sort of- Corrections, Six Flags or new information, Six Flags has been up since around around November, it sort of bottomed. Travis, I remember I was thinking of this because one, they have the ticker fun, which is fantastic. The stock has not been having fun, but Travis Kelsey and a group put in 200 million. That's right. The stock traded down pretty substantially. Yeah, I remember that. After the investment, but it's basically recovered to where it was. Well, it's still down over the past like five years. Yeah. Two years ago, it was like a $5 billion company. Yeah, down big. But what's interesting is that at this time of economic uncertainty and all these questions about hiring, questions about economic resilience, they are increasing revenues, increasing attendance, increasing customer spend. And that what driving the stock today And so I was looking at these two companies and I was like they sort of fit into this barbell thesis of the AI future which I been seeing pop up more and more And the two examples that I always give are one, the Ellison family is both like long slop and long anti-slop. They have a ton of infrastructure investments in AI through Oracle. And then they own legacy media like Batman, Superman through Warner Brothers. And then Josh Kushner is doing a similar thing with OpenAI and the San Francisco Giants, like two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. So you can think of roller coasters as potentially like anti-slop because you can't vibe code Space Mountain. But it's interesting to sort of like dig into the weeds of what's going on in the global economy and the American economy and seeing like where the unsuspecting winners are. Ryan Peterson shared a post from the, or a chart from the Financial Times that perfectly illustrates our possible futures. This is so funny that this is in the Financial Times, but they fully embraced what happens in the human extinction tech singularity and the end of scarcity tech singularity. In the bull case, real GDP per capita goes north of a million dollars. And in the human extinction scenario, it goes to zero of course, but the AI boosted growth path is a steady trend upwards. And that is the goal that I think everyone should be working for, potentially the end of scarcity outcome as well. And I think this chart that Ryan shares is sort of, I think, why there's anxiety in the market. Because there's this, you know, the whole like you're not prepared if it's not a bubble concept. But there's like a dual anxiety where like if AI gets too good, there's mass unemployment. Everyone's worried about that. But if AI is a bubble and it collapses, you go into a recession and everyone loses their job and like you're in a similar scenario of like economic anxiety for both the not necessarily the true doomers. I mean, obviously, they face a similar, you know, opinion. But even if you're just like in the it's overheated camp, there's real risk to the stability. And I think that's where a lot of the bubble concerns come from. although we're certainly not seeing very many signs of the bubble. I mean, obviously, the evaluations are high, but so are the revenue growth charts. So we can go through some of the folks that are arguing. Are you more of a back-of-the-envelope guy or a napkin math guy? Oh, that's interesting. I have a napkin here from WonderCo from the event I brought in. Oh, would you look at that? Yeah. A little souvenir. I like a napkin. I like a napkin. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, napkin math is insane. It's extremely hard to write on a napkin. Totally. It's way easier to write on the back of an envelope. Yeah, and you've got a lot more space. And you can get a big envelope. You can get an envelope that's eight and a half. It's effectively a spreadsheet. An envelope is kind of a core business utility. Yeah. Napkins can be used for anything. Yeah, if you're in napkin math, you've got to pivot. I will say I'm much more of a napkin math guy. Why? I can't. I mean, just kind of. The phrase that you pulled. Spiritually and the phrase that I pulled. But if I can't get excited about an opportunity based on what can fit on a napkin, then I'm never going to get excited about it. So you think a napkin is definitionally smaller? It's a lesser amount of math? It's a lesser vehicle than an envelope. Yeah, because a big envelope you could do a full spreadsheet on. Totally. You could write out comms and have multiple cells. No, so in practice, I'm a napkin math guy. But if something was really serious, I would probably trade that. Pull out the envelope. Yeah, we've been doing too much napkin math around here. It's time to pull out the big guns. Let's get out the envelope. Speaking of envelopes, so this morning I was telling Tyler, I'm incredibly overwhelmed with slacks, emails, DMs on every platform, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram DMs, XDMs. all the different messaging apps. And I was thinking how cool would it be if there was a service where you connected all your inboxes to, and then every day they would print out all the different messages and then bring them to you. And you could put like a box. You could put a box outside of your house and they would just put them in there. And then at a specific time, you know, maybe in a roughly like two hour window, you could go out and grab all the print out messages and sort of sort of like leaf through them decide what you need to respond to you would potentially because you're only getting messages once a day you would probably be a lot more intentional about what you wrote back and forth right um and i think that could be sort of the opposite of earth class mail those virtual mailboxes because they'll they'll they'll take your physical mail but i want everything i want everything in this box i want to put a box outside of my house that people put. And I think there's something there. Trump literally does this. He does that, right? He gets emails printed. And then he'll write with a big marker his response. And then his assistant will scan it and then email it back. Yeah. More on Seafry says a napkin is more available than an envelope. Very true. Often the best business meetings were not scheduled as a business meeting. So there aren't envelopes around. There's no envelopes around, but there's plenty of napkins. Also, I mean, you're saying napkins are smaller, but if you're at a restaurant and you have like a fabric napkin and you unfold that, those can be pretty big. But I feel like it's bad form to be at a restaurant. You're not supposed to ruin the napkins. Do you carry a pen that has washable ink? You have the crayons for the kids, right? The chat is saying I could call my service the United States Postal Service. That's a good name. Thank you, Alex. That's a great name. That's sort of like the San Francisco artificial intelligence company or something. that or the browser company of New York it would be inspired by that yeah I I think even with the crans you use his crayon closed-fisted grip right on the tablecloth okay I yeah I feel like if you give if you're given crayons you are expected to maintain that the child uses the crayons only on the children's menu which is typically made out of paper very disposable if you see the child using the crayons on a cloth napkin, you are expected as a patron to intervene. Jackson says, digitize this service and call it email. There we go. We got to establish the mailbox first. We got an idea. But then we can go there. But I like where you're going. Well, there's some other posts about the markets. Justin Spitler says them, be careful buying semis here. Obviously, the market's very, very overheated. Let's pull up this video, Travis. Let's play this video. Oh, this is Travis Pastrana? Yes. That's amazing. Nitro Circus, we mentioned many times on the show. Is he drinking a Red Bull? Yeah, no parachute. Oh, no parachute. Yeah, so he jumps out of the plane, no parachute. That's crazy. And then he's drinking a Red Bull. That's actually insane. And then he connects. He's got to do some tricks first. He's really taking his time here. The tension is building, building, building. And so he connects with someone who wraps him up. And then do they pull the parachute? They connect to each other. Or do they? They strap him to them. Oh, okay. There is a strap. They strap themselves to him. Because it seems sort of crazy just to bear hug and hope for the best. I don't think you're bear hugging. I don't know. It's Red Bull. Anything could happen. I would expect him to be delivered a full parachute, his own parachute, that he then, you know, dons. But he made it. Wow. Well, that's what it's like investing in semiconductors right now, I guess. Anyway, how was your last two days, Tyler? What did you get up to? It was sick. I was at the, I went to the trial. You went to the trial. Open AI, Elon trial. Okay, walk me through it. You left the studio on Tuesday. You leave the office at two after we wrapped the show on Tuesday. You went straight to the airport? I did. Okay. And then what time did you go to bed? Because you woke up really early, right? Yeah, so I got to the trial. So it's in Oakland. I got to the courthouse at, I think, something around 5.30. 5.30. Yeah, because you've got to get in line. So basically it a public because it like a federal case Yeah yeah there has to be some room for the public But there only like I think the number is somewhere like 20 or 30 Because I think it closer to 20 because I think part of the 30 is reserved just for media Okay. And when you got there at 530, were there already people standing in line? Yeah. So they were, I think there were like three or four people there already. Okay. In line. Early bird getting the worm. But yeah, well, because I didn't want to be late, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Of course. Did you talk to the other people? A few of them. So were you there before Mike Isaac? I was there before Mike Isaac. But he has a media pass. So, yeah, because last time when Mike Isaac came on the show, he said that because each, like, news. Yeah. New York Times got one pass, and he was splitting it with Cade Metz. And so they were sort of going back and forth, and I guess he had a media pass that day. Yeah. So that day he had a media pass. He got there pretty late. He got there at, like, 7.30 or 8. Okay. So you're there from 5.30. He gets there at 8. What time does the trial actually start? Around 8.30. 8.30? Okay. So basically I'm just posting up for, like, three hours. Okay. And then this is Wednesday. So walk me through. What are you seeing? There's these opening remarks from the judge. They sort of welcome everyone in. Yeah, jury comes in. Okay. So there are basically three main segments. So basically, I'll say it starts 830, ends at, I think, 2 p.m. There's two breaks, two 20-minute breaks. Okay. So it starts off, and we watch the deposition of Miramirati. So this is all live streamed, right? Yeah. The audio is live. The audio is live. But you're seeing a video. We're watching the video of her deposition. Okay. It's mostly covering the ousting, the timeline of the ousting. This is where all the text came out. Yeah, yeah. And were they showing you the actual text? Were they playing a video? Or were they playing the AI reenactment of the text? Because we have this. Someone turned Sam Altman's text to Miramirati into a 2011-style emo teenage heartthrob anthem. Did this make it into the courtroom or no? Let's play this. We have the audio. Can you indicate directionally good or bad? Satya and others anxious directionally very bad. Good motion graphics too. Whoever made this is talented. For an update, Sam, this is very bad. What? Is this Suno? Can you put in text into Suno and get a full song? I like this show. Play this for an AI skeptic. Yeah. and see what their reaction is. How do you see this and not want to build? I've seen these before, and I've always really enjoyed them, but with most of the AI music tools, I've never found a great way to put in a full script that I've written to get the results, but does Suno have that? So the author said his steps to make this. So first, he OCRed the images and turned them into plain text, so images of the actual text messages, and then removed the names from the dialogue, pasted it into Suno, and iterated like 20 to 30 times. And then finally thought this one was catchy. Okay. Yeah. Put up a version of this with the Gen Z brain rot slang. Yo, fam, can you give me a vibe check on am I cooked or nah for real for real? Satya and the gang low-key stressin'. Miramirati, yeah, you're skibbity. This isn't a rare L. This is an Ohio-level generational or a loss, little bro. Who ratioed me, Sam Altman says. Miramirati, some rando zesty NPC twitch looks maxing. Sigma. I'm not even going to go further. What else happened? Did someone actually get on the stand or was it all video? Yes. So the first like it's straight up teacher played a movie. It's movie day. The judge actually did get angry because like she was like, oh, the jury's going to get bored. And like she was like offering them coffee and stuff. So basically, yeah, the first maybe hour was mirror deposition video. And then we go through some of the actual like documents again, the text messages. And then Siobhan Zillis is testifying. So she's physically there. She was a open-eyed board member 2020 to 2023. And she steps down when Elon started XAI. I have no idea how long that was. That was the majority of the... It was during the whole conflict. Yeah. Perfect person to testify. Well, no. So she actually left the board before the ousting. So she left in February 2023. Ousting is November. Oh, okay. Interesting. The timeline always gets so jumbled up because there's like 2018 battles between Sam and Greg and Ilya and Elon. And then there's the board. Yeah, because all throughout this hearing, there's like, yeah, there's sort of two main moments. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And we're sort of clicking back and forth between them. Yeah. Chat wants to know what kind of wambos were being thrown around. Was Lorraine being used? People saying, can you please Lorraine this email? Siobhan was actually dropping some good lingo. I don't know if I can remember any of that. There's something like Mike Isaac always talks about, like they keep referencing Dota. and they keep everyone on the stand is using a ton of jargon. How jargony was it? Was it like Dwarkesh Patel podcast level jargon or like actual like researchers like talking to each other jargon? I would say it was not very sophisticated, especially among the lawyers, right? Okay. Siobhan, she did drop some good lingo. Okay. Yeah, it was some referencing some like why she got into AI. Sure. But, you know, acceleration and all this. Okay, okay. And then after that, we watched another like hour long video of Helen Toner's deposition. Wow. That was just about the ousting. Okay. Yeah, it was very fun. I enjoyed a lot. Like, basically, almost everyone, like, sitting in my section, which was basically the public and the media. Yeah. Like, everyone that came as the public were basically also media. They just didn't get the media pass. Sure, sure. So everyone surrounding me is on their laptop, like, typing, basically. Blogging. Yeah. Just, like, taking down what's being said. Yeah, yeah. And then I'm just sitting there enjoying it because it's, like, you know, it's good stuff. How would you rate Mike Isaac's, like, snack and overall food supplies for the day? Did he burn things? It looked pretty good. I believe he did bring the butt pillow. It seems like he's not making progress on the food front. I would expect by day seven of this, he would have a smorgasbord in front of him. I fasted the whole time. I just talked it out. Why didn't you figure it out? We have talked about the food situation so many times. How did you not think ahead there? I just wanted to make it more challenging. Okay. Yeah, I was like, this is going to be too easy. Deep Seek is raising a monster $7 billion round at $50 billion. valuation making it China's largest ever AI raise. But what shocks a Jaws here, CryptoPunk, the most is the founder. He's personally contributing 40% of the round himself. Wow. $3 billion coming from the founder directly. Owns 90% of the company unheard of at this valuation. DeepSeek was founded inside of his hedge fund, one of China's most successful funds. What a beast. He's got to acquire as much compute to push out new DeepSeek models. You know, we saw that chart that showed that Chinese open source models were sort of falling behind a little bit on a different growth curve in terms of performance. But, you know, he's certainly betting on getting back in line, having a frontier model within a couple months. Zach Brock says, congrats to Anthropic for defeating Grok in the market and feasting upon the compute of their fallen enemy. Yeah, basically every time we take a day off the show, like something big happens on Wednesday. was the XAI or SpaceX anthropic deal. A lot of people have been predicting that. I was not simply because I thought it was like the rational decision for the parties, but I thought that the tension between Elon, who had only a couple months ago been hurling insults at the anthropic team, I didn't think they would be able to uncover those cultural differences. But demand for compute finds a way. Yeah, I think that you and others had identified the possibility of becoming a NeoCloud, selling the compute. Yeah, last year I was talking about that a lot, all the time. I was like, look, they're incredible at building infrastructure, really, really fast, bringing power online. This feels like a very strong use for Elon, Inc. Yes. But as things evolved, I just didn't see this coming together. I didn't see this coming together specifically because of the cursor deal. I thought the cursor deal was the long-term solution for all that compute, and then the compute sort of got sold twice maybe, but of course there are multiple clusters, multiple Colossus data centers, and plenty of work to be done as SpaceX continues to grow their ambitions.