TBPN Live - Diet TBPN: November 7, 2025

Episode Date: November 8, 2025

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The timeline is in turmoil over Sam Altman again. Backstop gate continues unabated. The main point of debate is over Sarah Friar's comments that she used the word backstop. She backtracked on her backstop comment and said, I wasn't asking for a backstop of Open AI equity. I was advocating for this American manufacturing plan. Here's an Open AI document submitted one week ago where they advocate for including data center spend within the American manufacturing umbrella. They specifically advocate for federal loan guarantees, and Simfer Satoshi says, Sam lied to everyone.

Let's read the specifics. Yes. The specifics are AI server production and AI data centers. Broadening coverage of the AMIC, which is the American Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit, will lower the effective cost of capital, de-risk early investment, and unlock private capital to help alleviate bottlenecks and accelerate the AI build in the United States. counter the PRC by de-risking U.S. manufacturing expansion. To provide manufacturers with a certainty in capital, they need to scale production quickly. The federal government should also deploy grants, cost-sharing agreements, loans, or loan guarantees

to expand industrial base capacity and resilience. So what's happening here is Open AI a week ago, and everyone can go and read this letter, which is publicly available on their website. was making the recommendation that the government should effectively treat data centers or AI or token factories, put them in the manufacturing bucket, which would qualify them for similar incentives that traditional manufacturing, defense tech, etc. And I don't have a problem with asking the government for a handout. I think that that's actually like best practice. It's actually in your shareholder's responsibility.

Like you have a fiduciary duty to ask the government for as much help as possible. You have every incentive to ask your person in Congress, in your senator, the people in Washington, to do everything they can to support your mission. This has worked out in the past with Elon and Tesla. It didn't work out in the case of Cylindra. The game on the field is if there are taxpayer dollars that are moving around the board, you want to get those into the industries that are aligned with you. And so the thing that people are taking issue with is that in the opening of his message yesterday, he said, we do not want, we do not have all. or want government guarantees for Open AI data centers. Yes.

And that seems to conflict with the message, the letter that they wrote a week ago that is still up on their website. You can always advocate for like, we should change the game. Like we shouldn't be doing this. Like I would prefer a more of a free market economy, but in the world where we're not in a free market economy,

you want to have your company win, right? That's just rational. Now, it is weird optics to talk about the game on the field, and that's very odd. when you say, oh, yeah, this is a one hand washes the other situation. Or, oh, yeah, this is a situation where, you know, a backstop will allow us to be more aggressive. That feels like the banker saying, oh, yeah, I knew that the government was going to bail us out in 08. So I was intentionally underwriting loans where it was somebody's fifth house and I knew that they couldn't pay it.

I wasn't asking about their job. I wasn't asking about their income. I wasn't asking about their assets. Which is why I kind of expect a lot more of the narrative and to shift towards, subsidizing and incentivizing, like bringing new energy on time, which directly benefits the labs and anybody building a data center. But it also feels very much in America's interest broadly. It theoretically would benefit the average American too. Open AI needs to be crystal clear about the position that they're in, which is that they are the hottest company in the world. There is

unlimited demand for their shares. They could be a public company. They could go raise more private capital. They need to be on the opposite end of the risk curve from the stuff that's like, uh, no one really wants to invest in an American fab that might lose money for a decade. Like, when you think about the things that make money in the short term, it's SaaS, right? AI for SaaS. People's concern for, uh, government back data center lending. Yeah, yeah. Is that you're lending against chips, which have a really fast depreciation schedule. Yep. We don't know. And if you look at, right now, CoreWeave's corporate default swaps are now sitting around 500 basis points, jumped up dramatically. This is one of the leading neocloud.

They are only in the platinum. Neocloud in the platinum tier. And people are worried about them, right? Yep. Potentially, you know, having some bankruptcy risk. And so if you start doing government guaranteed data center lending, you could get in a situation where there's a bunch of new data centers that come online that really don't have a clear pathway to ROI. Yeah. And it just incentivizes the entire stack to just really exuberant.

Going back to Sarah Fryer's interview on Wednesday, she felt the market was not exuberant enough. There's been a lot of insanity this year, silliness. Maybe we don't need more. The director of the federal housing finance agency, William Pult, says Fannie and Freddie, eyeing stakes in tech firms. Bill Pult, the director of the federal housing finance agency, said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking at ways to take equity stakes in technology companies. We have some of the biggest technology in public companies offering equity to Fannie and Freddie in exchange for Fannie and Freddie partnering with them in our business.

We're looking at taking stakes in companies that are willing to give it to us because of how much power Fannie and Freddie have over the whole ecosystem. Yeah. This Wall Street Journal event is just so many articles came. out of this. Did you get a whole new soundboard? What's going on with the soundboard? I did. I still got all the classic. But I'm working with some new material. Let's give it up for global business. Let's give it up. You have a new neighbor. So Tom Petty apparently lived in your neighborhood in Malibu, California. He was living in Malibu in a $11.2 million house, 8,744 square feet, seven bedrooms. It has a music studio. The buyer,

is Stephen Slade Tien, a psychoanalyst, an author. TN. didn't respond for a request for comment. I wonder if he, if you'd want to, you know, get beers sometime, hang out. We should reach out to him for comment. I was at the first ever outside lands. Really? How old are you? Tom Petty headlined on Saturday. This was in August of 2008. And that was my first time smelling cannabis and I kept asking like his friend's parents what is that stinky smell it's every we can't get away from it yeah um Elon's trillion dollar pay package is done it's signed it's approved I'm sure it will be contested in the courts it's always contested in the courts Elon could get one trillion in Tesla stock if he hits all these different

tranches he's worth half a trillion now but he also owns 414 million Tesla shares outright, got another award in 2018 of 300 million shares, and this next award is 424 million across 12 tranches. Basically what he already had, they're giving him the same amount again. And there's a bunch of things that he has to do. He has to get the market cap really, really high. And then there's also these like qualitative operational goals, or I guess they're quantitative. 50 billion in EBITDA, 20 million cars delivered, 1 million robots sold, 1 million robotaxes in operation, 10 million full self-driving subscription. Now, some of those are obviously more gamable than others. What's the definition of a robot? If he comes out with a really cheap

robot and he sells a bunch of those because it's more of a toy, does that really fulfill the goal? What's the definition of a robot tax? Yeah, what qualifies? Is it just a Tesla that is enabled? Yep, and I turn on FSD and my friend rides in it. Is there anything for actual rides? Some of these are more gamable than others, but the market map really isn't. How many self-driving subscriptions are there today? I saw, I looked that up, it's somewhere between like one and three million right now. So he has to, he definitely has to like triple the size at least.

He hasn't sold any robots, so a million would be entirely new robots. He's obviously delivering a lot of cars. And on the EBITDA front, 50 billion in EBITDA, company did like 13 last year. So that's a huge increase in EBITDA. I mean, 50 billion and EBIT does a lot of money. He only has to take the market cap to 8.5 trillion, and Tesla is already worth a trillion. So it's going to be weird to live in the world of the trillionaire. But we are getting close.

Like that's going to happen, not just within our lifetime, like definitely within the next decade. I wonder how that's going to reshape our culture, like the world in America. Because when billionaires became so prevalent and prominent, there was a lot of heat that was taken off the millionaire. Billionaires are the heat shield. Yeah, so the millionaire became more accessible.

And the billionaire became the thing that the society scapegoats for all the problems. Approximately 9.4 to 9.5% of American adults are millionaires. Yeah. Like, what happens to the billionaire when trillionaires come in? Like, what happens when you have to say, like, well, like, trillionaires are the real policy failure, but billionaires are also the policies failure? And millionaires were like kind of okay with, but it's not great. It's like it becomes much more complicated. What does this mean for other companies? What does it mean for Sam Altman at OpenAI? Can he run a similar playbook? Could he go to the OpenAI for profit board and say, hey, if Open AI IPO is at $2 trillion, I want 20%. We know that Sam runs a, bit of an Elon playbook. They were in business together. They co-founded Open AI together. And then I also wonder what will happen at the Garden Variety Unicorn. If you're just the CEO of a $5 billion company and you're just kind of hanging out there and you say like, yeah, I had 30% of the company when I started. I've been diluted down to five or 10. But I like this company. And I want to get it up. Could I go to the board and say, okay, we're at $5 billion now.

If I get us to $50, will you double my equity position? How would the growth stage venture companies feel about that? I think the right way for founders to think about that is like no one's taking your shares unless you decide to sell them. Your job is just to make the share price go up and there's going to be more shares issued over time. But if you just make the share price go up forever, it doesn't really matter. And you can also buy back. Almost no other CEOs would take a deal like because it's so ambitious. Yep.

And so I think it's healthy. Our good friend Tyler Cosgrove has put together a slide deck for us. that tries to help map the Mag 7, really, I call it the TBPN top 10. TBPN top 10, the 10 most important companies in AI, loosely, the Mag 7 plus a few bonus ones. And we're going to try and take it through and look, you're about to hit the horse. We're going to try and go through the various companies and rank them based on how AGI-pilled they are and how much they need AGI. Is that right? Yeah.

So basically on the horizontal, we have how AGI-I pill they are. Sure. So I feel like that's fairly self-explanatory. You kind of believe that AI will become something like it can produce the median economic output of a person. So then on the vertical axis, we have how much they need AGI. Okay. So I think this is maybe a little harder, so I want to qualify this.

Yeah. So, I mean, this doesn't necessarily believe that you have this kind of sentient, you know, AI that's as good as a person. Yeah. But I think it more so in this context just means that AI will continue to be able to be able to be become more and more economically valuable. Let's start with Sam Allman. He believes in AGI right, he runs kind of the biggest AI company.

I think that more and more, at least in the short term, Open AI looks like a hyperscaler. They're kind of a junior hyper scaler. And I think their actions are more, you know, I think that Open AI, a lot of people, you know, want to say that they're bearish on Open AI at the current level. But ultimately, when you look at how their business is evolving, They seem to me like they'd be fine if the model's plateaued.

Next, we have Dario. Okay. He's extremely AGI-I-pilled. This is kind of the reasoning why he's so anti-China, right? Because he sees it as an actual race. This is going to see where intelligence. It is a national, you know, security. Totally.

It's a problem if China gets their first. You need a lot of continued growth for Anthropic to keep kind of making sense economically, I think. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Next is Larry. Larry Ellis, Larry. Yeah. Larry's in kind of an interesting spot here. So this is kind of a weird place to be

where you don't believe in AGI but you need it. Okay. How did he wind up there? He doesn't seem the type that believes in some kind of super intelligent God that is going to come that's going to birth this new thing and humanity will rise. Okay, Satya. Okay. I think this is a fairly regional spot. Obviously, there's some sense where he's slightly EGI-I-pilled

or maybe more than slightly. He believes in the power of the technology. Yeah, I mean, he's very early on Open AI. He thinks that AI in general will become very useful, but maybe it won't become, you know, super intelligent. Maybe it's not going to replace every person. It's just a useful tool. The quote I always go back to is him saying, like, my definition of AGI is just greater economic growth. So show me the economic numbers, and that will be, it's like, it's a very practical definition.

I think people seem as very reasonable. He's not getting over skis. Yeah, I like him in the center. I like him in the center of the grid somewhere. That seems like a real. He's also, if opening eye works out, he'll do very well. If they don't work out, I think he's also doing quite well. If Jensen was very IGI-pilled, I mean, he is the kind of, he's the rock on which this all is built on.

He has the chips. Yes, he has the chips. If he was AGI-pilled, he would not be given out those chips. He would keep them all to himself, and he would be training his own model. Okay. So that's why I think he's more on the, he doesn't believe in AGI's. Yes. There was a new blog post yesterday.

It was basically AI 2427. There was a new one. it was AI 2032. So it's basically very similar arguments. Different team, but the team of AI 227 was promoting it. Soundar. You believe it's an AGI more than Saja, you think? Yeah, well, I think you can see this in kind of,

they were even earlier in some sense than Satya, right, with deep mind. There is a little bit of like, if you really believe in AGI, the actions that we see are you like squirming and being like, I got to get in. It doesn't matter if I'm 1% behind or 10% behind or 80% behind? I got to get in. I think Sundar is also definitely below this line because, you know, Google has been doing very well. AI was at first, I mean, people thought of AI as like, oh, this is going to destroy Google. This is bad for Google. So if AI doesn't

work, then Google is just in the spot they were before, which is doing very well. If AI does work, then, I mean, Gemini is one of the best models. They'll do very well. So Zuck is also kind of an interesting spot. Yes. I think, I think Zuck is actually some someone who has shifted right word. It's fascinating. It felt like Zuck was sort of like, oh yeah, AI. Like it's this cool thing. I'm going to check the box.

I got my team. We did this fun little side project. It's this open source model. We kind of found our own little lane, but we're not like competing in the big cosmic battle. Do you think that was just a counter position to way to like try to win the AI word go say, hey, we're just going to try to commodit, commodify this market and like commoditize your couplets. So Elon, I mean, he's been AGI-I-pilled, I think, for a very long time.

Super AGI pill, I agree with that. Open AI co-founder, even before that, I think he was fairly big in the safety space. Totally. You see him, even on Joe Rogan, he was talking about AI safety. He still believes it. Yeah, he doesn't backed off. And AI safety is important because it's going to become super intelligent. It's going to take over the world.

Totally. Totally. So he talked yesterday about, about humanoids being sort of an infinite money glitch. And I feel like you kind of need. AGI in order to kind of unlock the infinite money glitch. Yes, but at the same time, very strong core business. The cars don't need AGI. The rockets don't need AGI.

Starlink doesn't need AGI. So he's not entirely indexed on it in the way the foundation labs are. Chad says, where's Tyler on the chart? Feels like Tyler isn't an AGI pilled anymore. Let's figure out. I actually am on the chart here. Let's go to Tyler. I am.

I'm over here. So I, yeah, I think. I think I'm very AGI-I-pilled, right? You know, I'm ready for the Dyson Sphere. Yes. I think it's, you know, only a matter of years, handful. Only a matter of years. If AI does not work, the macro economy is looking not good.

So I feel pretty bad about my job outlook. Okay. Without AGI. Sure, sure, sure. Even though you're already employed. Breaking news. Through the timeline. What's the breaking news?

T.J. Parker has finally found a new car that he likes. Guess what it is? Guess what it is. Do I get other rafter? R. Look at this. Look at this. Finally found a new vehicle I quite like and great gas mileage to boot. This was the problem with your Ford Raptor.

It wasn't the R. 0 to 60 and 3.9. 720 horsepower. 5.2 liter supercharged V8. Altman today, we're looking at selling compute, but we need as much as possible. Zuck last week, we could sell compute. Are we in a compute shortage or not? Because both are saying they're buying as much of it as they can and thinking about selling it.

I like that story about Jensen where, like, he understands the dynamic here, but there's still, you get kind of crushed if there's a sell-off in terms of demand. It's not the worst idea to buy as much as you can so that you have preferred access to it and then resell some if you have more than you need. I mean, we just talked to David Bazuki from Roblox, and he was saying that, look, we had our own on-prem, but then we had spikes of demand. And so we went to the hyperscalers for that. because they can load balance across, well, people are playing Roblox here,

and then maybe they watch some Netflix over there, and then they are storing, you know, all sorts of different data. And there's different workloads that happen at different times, jumping straight to selling compute. I think that the timelines are a little bit funky on this one. It seems odd. It seems rushed. It seems rushed.

Elon apparently confirmed that Tesla is going to build a semiconductor fab. It's still not enough. So, I think we may have to do a Tesla terra fab. Whoa. Great name. That is a bombshell. It's like giga, but way bigger. Terra, yeah.

Terabyte. He's feeling good right now. I can't see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we're looking for. So I think we're probably going to have to build a gigantic chip fab. Morris Jang and T.S. and C is like, no, actually, I'm fine. I will, I will supply you. Samsung is like, I'm good. I will do it. I'm good for it. Pull up this other, pull up this other video of Optimus. This thing has motion. Yeah, it's not bad. Imagine you're working late at the office one night and this thing just walks out onto the floor and starts looking at you and doing these moves. Yeah. Most people that bought Tesla's already had cars, right? And so it was just like a one-for-one swap. Who are you replacing? with this. Well, with this, you can replace like an exotic dancer. Yes, that's true. Elon Musk now has one trillion dollars in his bank account. That's a thousand times one billion dollars. He could give every single human on earth one billion and still

be left with $992 billion. Let that sink in. People love this funny math whenever it drops. China has a similar humanoid robotic project, although it's way, way scarier because it went full Terminator mode on this. In spooky, spooky territory is pretty crazy. In the last 10 months, three very talented friends have joined separate hot early stage startups in senior roles and quit after realizing that the company's actual revenue was significantly less than what the founder had told them during the interview process and shared online. Yeah, again, this is going back to spring, right, that just felt like every founder was feeling this insane pressure to show like one to 10 million of like a one to 10 million ramp that was just insane and the weird dynamic is that

like as that pressure ramps up you just get more and more incentive to fake it with uh community adjusted ARR and contracts that don't actually stick and Kazakhstan has signed an MOU to buy up to two billion of advanced chips from invidia let's hit the gong for Kazakhstan Warm it up, warm it up, warm it up, warm it up. Boom. Great hit. Great hit for our friends in Kazakhstan. Good to see them getting into the game.

Maybe they should do Borod 3 about data centers. Breaking Nvidia's losses accelerated to negative 5% of the day, now down 16% since Monday's high. That marks a drop of $800 billion since Monday. Wow, that is a wild sell-off. Didn't Tyler quote this and say, is this bullish? or something like that. No, that was on the DoorDash. They went down 20%.

Everyone's down 10 or 20%. Yeah, whether you beat or miss, you're going down. Heisenberg, sharing a little bit of red here. Microsoft down 10% in the last eight days. What the hell is he doing? He's shopping. Microsoft went down three points. That's real good.

Meta down 18% losses have accelerated. My inbox is full of people breathlessly trying to interpret this, and it is one-year look at spy. It's over. It's just completely over. The bubble popped. Now it's ready to start rebuilding. It was a good run. We can go out from here.

Oh, the stocks have already stopped trading. So we're safe now. We're safe. It can't hurt us anymore. The economy can't hurt you on the weekend. Bank of America, as of yesterday, just fully recovered from the global financial crisis. Wow. Took 19 years.

To the day, and then it's like back in another crisis. Can you imagine? Famously backstopped by none other than Warren Buffett. There's some more information on the Snap Perplexity deal. Snap gets 400 million, which is greater than Perplexity's total revenue. Snap gives nothing except access to... Wait, wait, wait, wait, whoa.

It's more? What? They're paying more than their revenue? The deal looks incredibly in Snap's favor. Snap gets $400 million, greater than Perplexity total revenue. Now, Signal is saying, this is most likely 399 million of perplexity equity to SNAP, not cash. So there is a question about how much of it is cash, but it is possible that they're just giving $400 million of equity, like a stock grant.

I was surprised that Snapchat has not figured out a way to just monetize all the capital that a lot of these consumer AI companies have, given their massive, massive user base. Snap will be integrating perplexity directly into Snapchat's chat interface. Perplexity will pay SNAP $400 million over a year in a mix of cash in stock as part of the deal and gets access to SNAP's 900 million monthly active users. Snapchat's going to accidentally build AGI, just trying to make the dog filter blink realistically. I love it. Deutsche Bank is exploring ways to hedge's exposure to AI to data centers.

It's looking at options, including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks and buying default protection via synthetic risk transfers. So, like, everyone is getting in on the action. Like, a few years ago, like, the, like, it was, like, if you have anything that's related to AI, like, go, go, go, raise money, grow it, spin it, flip it, turn it around, pivot it, whatever you want to do. Have a great weekend, everyone. We love you. Goodbye. See you Monday.