TBPN Live - Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, OpenAI Hits Back at Apple Over Lawsuit, Spider-Man Ads in BMWs | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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Starting point is 00:00:01 Big deal, the big one that's tearing up the timeline right now is that Airtable, founded in 2012, and once valued at $11.7 billion, is getting acquired by bending spoons founded in 2013, at 2.7 times ARR. Once hot startup, now an unfortunate victim of the SaaS bust, says DEDY DDoS. It raised $1.4 billion, only to be sold for $1.28. $2.5 billion enterprise value because they had almost a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. And so the total equity value was $2.25 billion equity value. Just clearing the preference stack.
Starting point is 00:00:46 So early employees, founders probably got something. Later investors probably got 1x their money back, but probably had it tied up for a few years. So not a good outcome. But there's some interesting silver linings here. Obviously, it's good for, could be good for bending spoons if they got a good deal and they turn it into a mammoth cash machine. Also, there's some nuance to where different pieces of the business are going because they're sort of dividing it up.
Starting point is 00:01:13 Really sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over a billion dollars and everyone's like, wow, that's unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in a wake-up call to the many maybe younger companies. companies that are at a lower revenue run rates that are raising at much higher valuations. Yeah. And basically signaling to them like you've got some many, many years of compounding to do. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:01:44 It's interesting. There's a Saspocalypse narrative, which is like these companies are going away. Software won't exist. You'll just prompt it. And I think there's a lot more nuance to it than that. But one thing that it does feel like the underwriting, the financial trajectory of these single point solution SaaS products, single player, somewhat sticky, maybe not that sticky, maybe replaceable. It's not that they're going to zero. Bending spoons wouldn't be buying it if everyone was churning and it was going to be a zero.
Starting point is 00:02:18 But at the same time, you can't underwrite it. It's growing 20%. Yeah, yeah. But you can't underwrite it at 40x revenue. 100x revenue anymore. And it feels a little bit like what happened with D2C e-commerce, honestly. There was a moment where e-commerce brands were venture backable. And you could and you could underwrite them or they were being underwritten similarly to venture startups that had true moats, true compounding advantages. They would get the same multiple as a SpaceX or or an AI company
Starting point is 00:02:53 or a social media company. And that never really made sense. It was sort of just a weird quark in the system for a couple of years. And then go forward a few years when there were some pullback. Some of the IPOs went out. They didn't do that well. They traded down. And all of a sudden it was like, okay, well, if we're doing, if we're doing, you know, in my
Starting point is 00:03:13 case, like food on the internet, we're going to VC back a food company. Like, has Nestle been disrupted? Like, no. And that would, now, or Unilever. Is Unilever trading down like crazy? They're facing so much pressure. And that's usually what happens when there truly is disruptive innovation. Like you see this with, I saw some crazy post about how people were bearish on Starlink for a while.
Starting point is 00:03:34 And the company that they were competing with just went bankrupt. And you see this with, you know, social media came out. And yes, like the newspaper and the internet, actually, the newspaper stocks did actually trade down. That never happened in e-commerce, D to C e-commerce, any of that. And we're now in this new regime. So I think that there's actually a pretty safe path if you just build the business. If you're saying, look, I am in this SaaS industry. It is going to be more competitive going forward.
Starting point is 00:04:01 But I'm setting myself up to have a reasonable multiple so that at every point, if I'm trading it three times ARR, I'm happy because the cap table is set up for that, right? Yeah, one thing I will say is I started using Airtable. It was 2015, right? So I probably started using it a few years in. But the product, the way that I used a product back then for my first business, I would 100% just vibe code a solution today. Because I was using very basic dashboard functionality. I wanted dashboards that we could use internally, share externally.
Starting point is 00:04:35 Now it would be very quite easy to just do all of that in codex or your favorite agent. So I do think that business is very much under threat over the long run, but still has sort of compounding that it can do, just given how, how deep it is into the Fortune 500 and a long tail of small businesses. I'd be very interested to know what is, you know, new user, new logo growth like versus just expansion within an organization. Because if you have some company that's already sort of running on Airtable, they're growing, so they're adding seats, they're adding functionality because they're sort of bought in and
Starting point is 00:05:11 they're not going to rip it out. What does that growth rate look like versus, you know, new companies actually go and signing up and saying, like, yes, this is the best tool for the job. Because you do get a lot built for free. And it's not like they don't have access to AI agents that can improve their systems. Like you might be doing a lot of maintenance on your vibe coded solution. But at the same time, a lot of people, especially in smaller organizations, we're using this as like just one small dashboarding tool, one small database that is sort of replicable.
Starting point is 00:05:42 So interesting to see where it goes. And yeah, just like an interesting data point in the SaaSpocalypse, late stage growth, like, is it a zombie corn? What term are you using for it? Jared Sleeper has some more thoughts. 480 million ARR growing 20%. It's a unicorn exit. Many very satisfied customers, including Jared Sleeper for years, fantastic run. Never underestimate how much VCs love products that make, quote, everyone a builder.
Starting point is 00:06:11 The wrinkle is that one-player products are high churn. Was Airtable, I feel like the whole pitch for Airtable was that it was multiplayer, but maybe that wasn't the way that people were actually using it that often. A lot of people would just be like, oh yeah, that guy on the team is using Airtable for that thing. But, I mean, certainly from very early on the pitch. I think by one player, he means that you can, it's more like product led, like one person at a company. Because I've only used it in a team capacity, right? But one player can sign up, start using it, invite other people. people to the team. Yeah. But it's an advantage because you're bottom up, you can just ramp into a
Starting point is 00:06:50 different company so quickly. But at the same time, if you're not like going through the CFO and being like, there's a mandate that we're using the ERP system. Selling 200 seats at once. Exactly. Yeah, it is a little different. Three, his third point, gross retention remains the single greatest predictive variable of terminal value for any business that doesn't have a scale effect or network effect. It dictates somewhat mathematically what folks like bending spoons will pay. Great to see employees get liquid, but perhaps sad that some are learning about liquidation preferences, SAS multiples to their disappointment. So, of course, if you had mentally marked your stock at 11 billion, but then this deal happens, the investors that put in that money at 11 billion, they're going to get
Starting point is 00:07:32 their money back first, and then you're going to have to fight for whatever's left over, the scraps. Silicon Valley can do a better job talking to employees about what stock is worth in various scenarios, but no one is incentivized to do it. Well, I mean, you can also. So just look it up. There's a whole bunch of blog posts about it. You can ask chatyPD and get a whole deep dive on run this whole scenario and play out every possible option. But yes, I agree. No one likes to, you know, oh, we're closing a big candidate.
Starting point is 00:07:59 Let's tell them about what's going to happen if bending spoons comes in. Let's tell them what happens if we get our spoon bent. Benning spoons is emerging as the constellation software of the prosumer high churn, higher churn, SaaS is a fascinating turn of events and a good thing for preft stacks everywhere, just because there's more liquidity for systems? Well, it's a buyer of last resort. Yeah. Whereas.
Starting point is 00:08:24 Like no founder setting out, hey, I want to be, you know, go on this generational run and then get my spoon bent. But it's still, it's still great because it allows, again, it is real liquidity. Yeah. This is a win. I think bending spoons. Spending spoons will obviously end up, I would say, right-sizing the company. They're not going to continue to run it the same way that it's been run.
Starting point is 00:08:49 But at least it allows everyone to get out and go on to do new things. Yeah. In an interesting twist, speaking of getting out, Shiel Monot shares this about the Airtable acquisition. They spun out their AI business hyper-agent prior to the acquisition. So the company lives on and likely some cash with it probably can be recapitalized. seems like a fantastic outcome, shed the old business and focus on AI. So I would be very interested to see who is going to be working at Hyperagent. Is this something where the founders didn't want to exit the business entirely and then just start from scratch?
Starting point is 00:09:26 They wanted to take a whole bunch of the team with them and they wanted a bunch of their resources and learnings. And so they were able to package everything up and this will be something that's very founder led. Or was this just, okay, that is a more expensive piece of the business. Benning's business. It's earlier and it's ramp. Maybe it's working. Maybe it's not. But that's not the business that's bending spoons in.
Starting point is 00:09:45 And so this is more like a bending spoons driven. Look, we've had both founders on the show. Bending spoons is like, hey, let's take a great product and just basically right size the team, run it efficiently. And we're not trying to get growth back to 200, 300% a year. Howie's been on the show. He talked a bit about hyperagent. That's a product that if they execute well can grow 10x year over year. Right. And so I could imagine, again, leaving some of the team to just continue running
Starting point is 00:10:14 air table indefinitely. And then again, like you said, taking some of the talent out and saying, like, let's take another big swing. Liquidity is laughing about the fact that bending spoons has a very soft, friendly brand. Bending spoons branding, very, very simple. And it just sounds like such a simple name. It's not like Cerberus Capital. And yet, when they negotiate their presumably difficult to negotiate with? I don't know. I mean, in a certain sense, situation, you can be very friendly and amicable and just sort of say, like, yeah, we're a buyer at 2.7 ARR, you know, we're not going to like screw you over here. We're just going to give you,
Starting point is 00:10:49 this is a fair price, take it or leave it, and you can take it. You don't necessarily need to be this like crazy werewolf of like a shark, you know? Yeah, there's just not, there's just not that many, there's not that many buyers for a company like Airtable. Yeah. And it's a, a just sort of in this, in this economy, a slow growing enterprise software business, right? There are not that many buyers. If Airtable had wanted to sell in 2020, I'm sure they would have gotten meaningfully more. They probably did have offers at different points. You can imagine Airtable, you know, ending up at a, you know, a sales force as an example. But now, Luca is saying the buyer of last resort is, is like maybe, maybe unfair. Yeah, just like a value-based buyer. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Snap earnings
Starting point is 00:11:36 happened and Evan Spiegel was on CNBC's talking to Sorkin and it's a very interesting storyline because people are obsessed with the specs I mean job completed in terms of like getting more attention for the company
Starting point is 00:11:51 but it's been sort of a weight around the company because the question is like okay is everyone going to be buying $2,200 smart classes from you anytime soon when that's not really the story the story is actually like the revenue growth, the profit, the operating leverage, the coming back into the business. So, I mean,
Starting point is 00:12:10 overall, it was a good quarter for Snap, clear beat. Revenue was up 19% year over year, with profitability and cash generation rising even faster. So that's that operating leverage. They're growing revenue faster than they're growing costs, and so they're increasing their margins. Advertising revenue grew 9% to 1.5% to 1. Roughly 3 billion in the quarter, but the really interesting number that was surprising to me was they're making $316 million a quarter in subscriptions and paid services, up 85%. So just subscribing and being a paid power user, it's only 3% of the user base, something like that. That's now a billion dollar line of business, obviously very high margin, working really plays to the strengths of what SNAP offers. And usage is up globally,
Starting point is 00:13:04 but they're losing a step in Western markets. So the North America, I think, fell 7% and Europe fell 2%. And so that's not great for long-term ad monetization because you want to be on the richer countries generally, but still revenue is accelerating. They are monetizing better. And that's probably an AI story. It's just like a boring AI story because it's like the ad recommendation system
Starting point is 00:13:26 got a little bit better and nobody really cares. People want to focus on specs, but they're $2,200 and they're bulkier than competing smart glasses. Well, it felt like in that interview, Spiegel was talking about specs, but he wasn't wearing them. Yeah, does he need to wear them all the time? I think he kind of needs to wear them all the time. I mean, you're going to hold Apple to that? Tim Cook's got to wear Vision Pro everywhere he goes. That would be hilarious. No, but the Vision Pro is not meant to agree. Augmented reality. It's augmented reality. It's meant to be worn 24-7 if you're a serious person. Let's actually pull up the- You should do a full show. If you love Apple Vision Pro so much. It would not be a problem.
Starting point is 00:14:02 Do the full show. Okay. Do the full show. This Friday. We'll test around it with Tyler. So here's an interesting tip of it. Spex, it feels like, oh my God, they're spending so much money. It's like so crazy.
Starting point is 00:14:18 I think the rough estimate is like $300 million a year, which is a lot, but it's only 5% of their cost. It's like 20% of their overall R&D budget maybe, something like that. These are very rough numbers, but it's not like if they just spun out specs or cut specs and they were just like, we're not doing anything there. All of a sudden, the business is like wildly profitable. It's not that big of a stone around the neck. It's more just like a distraction and a question. And it's also not great that on the earnings call, they asked how many pre-orders have you sold any sort of danced around it and really give a straight answer on that? Because if it was good, you'd probably be like, yeah, we sold a lot of this thing.
Starting point is 00:15:00 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's play a little bit of Evan Spiegel on CNBC. I want to hear him talking. Snap reporting Q2 results after the bell on Monday. They scored an earnings beat with $1.6 billion in revenue. It's 19% higher than just one year ago and joining us right now for more SNAP CEO, Evan Spiegel. He did not bring his glasses on the set, but we're going to talk about those glasses just a minute because I think that's been a big part of the story.
Starting point is 00:15:24 But you beat across the board. Not just, by the way, on the revenue piece, but on the margin piece, which is what I think the market was actually looking for. Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me all. And Andrew, it's such a beautiful morning here in Aspen. It was a great quarter for Snap. And I think what folks are seeing is that the free cash flow of the business is really starting to inflect, which is allowing us to offset dilution, to strengthen our balance sheet,
Starting point is 00:15:45 and of course to continue investing in the future, which is so important to us. Okay, click forward to like 230. I mentioned glasses. We'll get there in a second. I think glasses. I want to hear him talking about. About $2,200 right now? 2100 is what they're going to come in?
Starting point is 00:15:58 21, 95. Okay. So the question I keep thinking about is how quickly those can come to market in a way and at a way and at a price point that people buy them, you know, en masse. And how you think about the competition coming from whatever you think Apple is ultimately going to create, whatever you think Google is working on, and whatever you think meta is going to do next. Well, we've been working for more than 12 years to reinvent the computer and make it feel more. I think today people are spending more than seven hours on average staring at screens. Spex represent the opportunity to bring computing into the world to make it a shared experience
Starting point is 00:16:31 and ultimately to help bring all the productivity gains we saw in desktop computing and laptop computing to the real world and to real world jobs, which is the vast majority of jobs, about 60% of jobs. So I think this computing transformation is incredibly exciting. We're certainly the leader in the space. I think specs represent a totally new category. If you look at the landscape today, you have very bulky but capable headsets. And then you have very limited but lightweight. AI glasses and specs represent you know the capability of some of these VR headsets and in terms of the
Starting point is 00:17:02 immersiveness and the ability to really have a full workstation experience but with the wearability of some of these lighterweight glasses products. But do you say to yourself Apple's going to come and do the same thing and meta is going to go? I mean so how do you think about that given the cost of putting this all out there and the amount of money that some of these big companies can actually throw at this? Yeah well I think you know as we look at the history of innovation I actually think one of the things that helps power innovation are constraints right and and one of the things that makes SNAP so unique is that we've been so laser focused on specs for such a long period of time. So I think this focus, our history of innovation, you know, and our first
Starting point is 00:17:36 mover advantage in the space. It feels like it should be a different company. If you want to be laser focused, it feels like the benefit would be like do the Elon thing, start a separate company that is laser focused on it. The investors in that company are laser focused on that, the employees. Yeah, have a distribution deal with SNAP. Yeah. You know, like just have this, like, you know, gets, we're good in this video, just get snapped to a really polished, oiled machine, you own all the equity, you, you have the founder control, it's your, you know, your, your financial backstop, your, your, your credibility for, to actually go and truly laser focus, because like, it's weird to be laser focused on a thing that's not your
Starting point is 00:18:20 core business. And then everyone's just constantly asking you, like, we'd love for you to laser focus on the main business that's making billions of dollars every year. Seems pretty solid. Yeah, it's like making $6 billion. Well, what do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I mean, earlier this year, they did spin off the AI video company. Yeah. And that seems like much more related to the main, like, you know,
Starting point is 00:18:39 chat app than the glasses, right? What is the AI video company? I think it's called Dotmo. It was like their internal generative video team. Interesting. He was just talking about enterprise use cases for the glasses. I mean. Like workplace use cases?
Starting point is 00:18:54 It's so hard to imagine. As an independent company, you make a really great device. I can imagine that company having its own go-to-market motion saying, hey, Amazon, we want you to use our devices across your workforce. And maybe they do a pilot. But trying to sell in like Snapchat glasses into the enterprise feels like just going to be a tough sell. Open AI is firing back at Apple. A little glazy, though. They say Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time.
Starting point is 00:19:23 What a funny way to kick off a blog post firing back in a lawsuit. Apple just cooked. Well, they say it built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. True. And then they go on to say maybe there were some details that were missed. Yes. So what were the key things that they said? Apple accused Open AI of ignoring them.
Starting point is 00:19:46 Turns out the lawyers emailed the wrong Asian guy because two Asian last names look similar. They claimed you discussed the allegation. with OpenAI's general counsel. They admitted that that conversation never happened, accused an ex-employee of improperly accessing files. They forgot to mention Apple employees were allegedly asking him to access those same files after he left. So there seemed to be some scenario where, like, the guy had left, but he had so much internal knowledge that someone at Apple was just like,
Starting point is 00:20:14 hey, like, can you remind me where this thing is or something? Yeah. When reading through the initial complaint, Apple made it seem like the, the employee or the former employee was just running wild through his old laptop. He had sent a message to someone at Apple saying something to the effect. I'm paraphrasing, but I still have access to my computer, L.O.L. But the reason that in the text messages that they shared, you can imagine the reason that he was there and sending that message, why would he send the message if he was doing something that he was wrong
Starting point is 00:20:49 that he would feel guilty of, right? He was helping his former teammates. And they say, there's 10 other people I could ask you, but you're the smartest or something like that. Yeah. And so when you have all this context, the story looks quite a lot different. Yeah, they're sharing a lot of text messages. You can go read the blog post, but there's like full back and forth eye messages between Chang Liu and Apple employees where Chang, whose last day at Apple was January 22nd, 2026, is being asked by his former colleagues to help them locate files and information to assist them with their Apple work. note other individual names and Apple confidential information has been redacted.
Starting point is 00:21:27 So certainly another wild. Yeah, I'm still just very surprised that Apple during the middle of a, you know, a year-long talent raid would know that someone significant had quit and that would not go through the process of actually taking back their laptop and making sure that, you know, the separation was really finalized. People have been saying stories how historically, you know, maybe call it 15 years ago, if you quit Apple, someone would show up to your house immediately and take back any prototypes that you may have had or anything of the sort.
Starting point is 00:22:09 Yeah. I'm excited for prediction markets to get on this, honestly. It was very helpful during the Elon Musk Open AI case. Currently, Kalshi has a few here. Will the OpenAI Johnny Ive device have a screen? No is at 82%. When will OpenAI release Astra?
Starting point is 00:22:30 There's some dates here. What else are they? Will Open AI increase the cost of chat GPT? No at 87%. No market on the Apple lawsuit because it's still very early. There's not even like a court date yet. But we'll keep tracking it
Starting point is 00:22:45 because it's an interesting story. Is BMW forcing owners to watch a Spider-Man brand-new-day promo when they start their cars up. That's the question. A lot of people were upset about this. Jority this morning is like, this is awful. There's some nuance here. So BMW owners are debating the company's latest in-car promotion after videos spread across X
Starting point is 00:23:11 showing a Spider-Man brand-new-day animation appearing on their vehicles infotainment screen at startup. And the reason why this fake news triggered me was, back in the day in college, I was getting a Kindle. And on the checkout page, it was like, do you want to save $10 and get the ad-supported Kindle? And as a college student, I was like, hmm, saving $10 sounds pretty nice. And then I had to live with a Kindle that would sit on my bedside table, just blaring ads in my face constantly. And it wasn't like, I would have actually appreciated ads. Can you just flip it upside out?
Starting point is 00:23:45 True. Wow. One simple trick. One simple trick. One simple trick. But it wouldn't be ads for, like, Spider-Man. It would be ads for random books. Right?
Starting point is 00:23:56 Yeah, books. And the targeting wasn't good. So, again, people don't like ads. If the target was good. Anyways, what happened here, John? Okay, so venture capitalist, Sheel Mohnot wrote, When you start a BMW, it shows you an ad for Spider-Man, really cheapens the BMW, in my opinion.
Starting point is 00:24:14 A 16Z partner, Josh Elman, added, of all the brands I thought might, I thought might bombard you with in-car ads on screen right when you start the engine. I had BMW pretty dang low on that list. This seems the opposite of luxury and performance. Is BMW a luxury brand? I thought they were premium.
Starting point is 00:24:33 I, yeah, I think it's a premium brand. Premium brand. Even Paul Graham weighed in, though, reposting Monaut's video and saying, I'm never buying a BMW. He's never buying a BMW. What about an old BMW? They can't show you ads in a E39M3.
Starting point is 00:24:48 Wait, but what actually happened? You have to opt into this. Community notes added important context. According to One Note, the Spider-Man promotion is an optional startup banner available on compatible BMWs from July 27th through August 10th, 2026. The banner does not automatically play a full-screen ad. Instead, owners must tap it to launch a themed animation featuring music and synchronized vehicle lighting. BMW has offered similar limited. time startup experiences in the past, including holiday-themed animations.
Starting point is 00:25:20 Jordan, you know like it? Very, very, very different. You can just see the pop-up there. Surprise, Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW. That's if you press the button. You have to actually turn it on. It's not. Yes, yes, but I'm saying there's a banner ad. Oh, there is a banner ad. It's just a banner. Look at the video. Start it over. Let's see. Let's be the judge of this. Look at this banner. It's a banner. Oh, okay. And then you click the banner. then it plays an ad. So it's a pop-up that you click.
Starting point is 00:25:50 Okay. And it's like, wait, what is this pop-up? Yeah. It should probably be tucked into a setting somewhere. There should be an icon that's like promotions or themes. That didn't look tucked in anywhere. They're literally saying, surprise, a Spider-Man ad. And they're not even, like, they should just say, hey, we have an ad for Spider-Man here.
Starting point is 00:26:10 If you'd like one. Okay, this is right on the line. But this, this is, this crosses my line. It crosses your line. Because you're like, what does Spider-Man have to do? What does Spider-Man have to do with my car? And then you click it and you get an ad for Spider-Man. Spider-Man is doing well, though.
Starting point is 00:26:25 So the ads are working. So, you know, maybe the BMW owner showed up in droves because the new Spider-Man movie scores Hollywood's second biggest debut ever. That's actually huge. The Sony film grossed $932 million through Sunday, topped only by 2019's Avengers Endgame. That is massive. Did you realize that this movie was making that much money?
Starting point is 00:26:52 I mean, if you had asked me an hour ago, is there a new Spider-Man movie coming out? I would say, haven't heard of anything. Yeah. I haven't seen that much energy about it. I've been aware of it, but I have not seen like a massive takeover. But also, I'm not driving an ad support of BMW, so maybe that's the problem. Spider-Man spun a massive weekend for movie theaters flouting superhero fatigue and giving a major boost to Hollywood's summer box office.
Starting point is 00:27:22 Sony pictures Spider-Man brand new day open to an estimated 90- We got some good ideas here in the chat. Yeah, what we got? So, ad-supported cars that get you free self-driving, where the ads take over the whole entertainment system in the car. So you're sitting there relaxing, you know, the car is driving itself. But then it's just blaring high volume every... I'll take it a step further. Every five minutes, one 30 second ad. What if there was a whole volume?
Starting point is 00:27:49 What if there was a whole company dedicated to building self-driving cars that was funded by an advertising company? Like a company that just prints billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising. Like their DNA is advertising, and then they go into the self-driving car market. They would have a huge advantage in terms of targeting. Yeah, why has no one done this before? Yeah. They could even have a video platform where they're making a lot of money running video ads and they could take that video platform. Like a YouTube.
Starting point is 00:28:17 Yeah, exactly. So you could have like a huge ad network, YouTube ads and then you can have a self-driving car company, put them all together. That's synergy right. And maybe you could spend the company out at some point and raise some venture capital too. Spin the company out. They secretly still advertising. No. I don't think Waymo will do crazy ads.
Starting point is 00:28:38 I think, I don't know, maybe. A major streaming executive just texted me and says, okay, going to get Tubi to build a car right now. You got to build a car. You got to do it. SpaceX announces a new partnership with Nvidia to design its StarMind AI1 payload, bringing data center class compute into orbit. That makes a lot of sense.
Starting point is 00:29:06 Let's find some actual numbers. So revenue was 7.81 billion versus 6.93 billion expected. Loss per share was 9 cents. Average analyst estimated a loss of 26 cents. Revenue jumped 92% from 4.1 billion a year earlier. So huge, you know, you're even at this scale still doubling the revenue. And it's the first time Elon Musk's reusable rocket maker will face Wall Street in this capacity. And investors are jittery.
Starting point is 00:29:43 SpaceX stock has dropped 16% since opening at $150 a share on June 12th. And SpaceX lost $4.9 billion last year, largely due to heavy investments in artificial intelligence, which we've discussed. The company merged with Musk's XAI in February. CNBC reports saying that at the time the vision was to build data. centers in space, but the launch business, which counts on large contracts from NASA, is losing money. Most of SpaceX revenue for the year, and its only source of profit came from its connectivity segment, which consists of its Starlink Internet service. Starlink is sold directly to consumers. So here's how SpaceX performed in the three key segments. For space, they brought in
Starting point is 00:30:26 $962 million versus $835 million, which was expected. So they beat in space. On connectivity, they brought in $4.29 billion. So the Starlink business is more than four times the size of the actual launch business. They brought in $4.29 billion versus $3.83 billion that was expected. So they beat there. And on AI, they brought in $2.56 billion versus $2.18 billion expected. So beats across the board. And very interesting to see that the thing that they started doing, space, of course, launching rockets.
Starting point is 00:31:05 is now their third largest line of business. Connectivity is, of course, bigger, and also AI is bigger. Everything is computer, John. Everything is computer. That is a good summation of it. And that's a good place to end our show.

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