TBPN Live - Musk Loses OpenAI Case, Leopold’s 13F, Data Center Backlash | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: May 18, 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 each 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.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

Massive day-to-day, tons of big stories, five big stories I want to go through. Obviously, the first one is that the U.S. jury finds OpenAI CEO Sam Alman not liable to Elon Musk for straying from charitable mission because Musk waited too long to sue. Weird, like technicality, I guess, but good news for Open AI. Judge confirms verdict and that Musk's lawsuit is dismissed. Yeah, apparently they deliberated for about 90 minutes. 90 minutes. And they didn't really make any type of statement other than the statute of limitation.

And so Max Zaff over at Wired says jury unanimously rules that Musk's claims are dismissed on the timeliness issue. He filed the lawsuit too late. Court affirms it will uphold the jury's decision. It's over. Musk loses the lawsuit against Open AI. And Mike Isaac, the Rat King, says unanimous verdict in Musk versus Open AI is in after only 90 minutes of deliberation. So did they deliberate today? they showed up at nine and went from 9 to 10.30 and then delivered the verdict. Is that what we think

happened? Because Friday's off in the jury, right? No Fridays. Yeah, jury showed up this morning. Okay. Talked for 90 minutes. So they got to think about it all weekend and Friday. Interesting. Of course. Rat King says, huge day. Wow. And what did Tyler post? He posted a video of Drake talking about something. What's going on over here. W's in the shot. W's in the shot. Is that the opening eye slack right now? I think that's when he, is gambling in front of my. It is a funny way to pronounce chat, but I enjoy it. The big news that was going on all weekend, actually, there was a lot of anticipation

for Leopold Ashenbrenner Situational Awareness Hedge Fund to drop the 13F. It was supposed to go out Friday night, 5 p.m. Everyone was saying, oh, if he, if he's not releasing it. Well, people were expecting it throughout the entire day. Yeah, they were very excited. And then there was some speculation that he had been able to petition to not have to release it. That was one theory. That was one theory.

The other theory is that he was just entirely in cash. Yeah, don't need to report it. I just wind it down. Said it was a good run. Yeah. It's over. Yeah. He's like, I counted the ooms and there's none left to count.

We're done. Pack it up. No, quite the opposite. Leopold Asherbreder, the hedge fund's chief investment officer is known for making extremely successful investments based on his core assumption that Frontier AI will continue. to improve at half an order of magnitude, 0.5 ooms per year, which translates into a thesis that AI will create unprecedented demand for compute and its associated bottlenecks. John, they're saying it is blindingly light.

It is brighter in the Ultradown. Yeah, I think we got some new lights. We're sort of, you know, tweaking things. I do like that the wide is less dark. There's been a number of times we've gone to watch videos and we've been very dark in the front. So we're bringing some light around. We'll see.

Maybe we over did it. Maybe we'll dial it back. I need to brush my hair. My hair's a little scruffy today. I also need a haircut, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that later in the show. John will be getting a haircut live on the program. Potentially.

Before we go any further, Nick over the weekend, picked up a little gift for our very own Tyler. So we wanted you to open it on the video. On the video, Nick, wait it in line. He waited in line. Look at this. Look at this. He waited in line.

Wait in a very long line just for you, Tyler, because what is it? I'm trying to open it. A little anti-clin. Wow, it's a, what is, I don't know how to pronounce this. Am I reading upside down? It's a little watch. Let's go. Another watch for Tyler.

It is not. I don't know if you thought it might have been something else. have been something else, like the Swatch AP collaboration. But really, like, the whole, you know, everything in the swatch portfolio is fantastic, including this. I don't know. Describe what's on there. What is on there?

Yeah, Nick, what is it? He says it has a rotating bezel. Okay, but just to be clear, it's not the, it's not the Royal Pop. Which was completely sold out and causing, like, stampedes all over the country, all over the world. I saw footage, I think, from an international country around people really mobbing it. You were mentioning that you thought it was maybe an oral loss for both companies because of the craziness. Yeah, I just, your brand is now associated with chaos. Yeah. That's not good. Right? And AP, although it's, although it's exclusive, like you have to sort of wait in line. The waiting in

line is like, here, have a, have a Diet Coke and sit in this private room while I tell you. you that you will not be getting an allocation in the skeletonized APEU. Come back soon. Royal Oak or whatever, right? Come back soon. And it's a, and it's a very high brow waiting in line. Yeah. And this was sort of a-

Yeah, they had to come out over time and say, these are not going to be limited. We're going to selling them a lot. Yeah. And so the people that wait in line just to sell on the secondary market, I think have done pretty well. Oh, really? At least in the short term.

Okay. I would expect that over time prices will sort of retrace toward retail. I did see a funny graphic of somebody that was like basically saying like, you know, comparing like getting a job versus waiting in the line to get it. And you actually did quite a bit better if you just got a job on Monday and instead of getting in the line. And then over time, you know, your earnings really ramp out. Let's go back to Leopoldaschenbrenner and his 13F, the infamous 13F. There's a lot of discussion around it on the timeline. Really, like we have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time.

It's because it's breaking out of FinTwit. It's breaking into tech, teapot and tech X and all of that. Mostly because a lot of the discussion centers around, the filing shows he's made some massive puts across the semiconductor sector, $2 billion on SMH, the VanX semiconductor ETF. And so there's, there's, and it feels like maybe more, more of a pointed thesis. less broad, hey, semiconductors are going to do well, more. I actually, me, Leopold in this case, understand where the real value is,

what companies within the semiconductor industry are undervalued, which ones are actually going to be useful in the next iteration of the buildout. And a lot of stuff has been priced very hotly. Some stuff is overheated. The Nvidia trade for a while became like crushingly obvious and then it grew so much that that was not. one of his early positions. Now it is looking like he is going long in video, which is

interesting in the backdrop of is in video a car. Do they still have a moat? Well, there might still be something else going on there. You have to dig in through this and understand what's going on. But the filing is hard to interpret cleanly because a 13f is only a snapshot of holdings as of March 31st, 2026. These positions are stale. He might have rotated out of these. 13Fs do disclose put-and-call options. They don't disclose the strike prices, expirations, premiums paid, hedge ratio, short position, swaps, or whether the options are part of broader structures. So you have to be careful out there if you're trying to read the tea leaves too precisely.

You can only take away so much from these. So Feijau, I don't know how to pronounce that, says unfathomably bad takes around this morning and a good reminder of why 13F digging is mostly a waste of time. March 31st, we were in the heat of the Iran War. It makes sense to put on hedges at the time. Options, exposure on 13F gets quoted notionally as if it were a hundred delta, i.e. all 100 shares per contract. So when you see something like, oh, he owns a billion dollars of Intel, it's usually he owns the right to purchase a billion dollars of Intel. And he has actually deployed far less capital into that position, although it is sometimes an important sign of things to come.

We have no way of knowing whether these were five delta convexivity hedges, convexity hedges, and represented a fraction of what people are saying were billions in puts or whether they were ITM puts in the money puts. Further, outright shorts don't get reported either. Too much noise associated with the things that happened back in March that aren't relevant now. We have no idea about his turnover in assets and trade frequency. A lot happened in the months of April and May. His positioning could be completely different, making investment to do. decisions for 80 vol assets based on data from months ago.

Sounds like a good way to burn money. So don't idolize people and develop your own thesis for why you own and sell things. That is a good takeaway. Anyway, the AI backlash is continuing in a bunch of different ways. And one interesting sort of twist on this is that a lot of the AI maxis, the AI bulls, were sort of concerned at least that this would all be fossil fuel-based build-out because everything else was too slow. They might be fans of nuclear. They might be fans of solar, but it was seen as infeasible, seen as the timelines being far too long. So if Leopold is in fact

taking a position in T1 Energy, that sort of leads me to think that there's a little bit of a shorter timeline to at least bringing some solar power to bear during the AI buildout, that it's not all just sort of a hope and a dream that there will be solar power. power on the grid in any near amount of time. A lot of the nuclear power companies are moving on the backs of the AI buildout, but it's still 2032, you know, when we talk to these folks, even the optimistic ones. So there has been big pushback on AI data centers across the board. We've talked about this a bunch.

And it's both a left and right wing issue now. Sager and Jetty predicted this, I think, last year when he joined our show. And it's been interesting. Left wing is worried about job displacements. placement, theft of art, destruction of creativity. Right-wing sees them as surveillance centers. That's the latest term, is that they're used to spy on people, so that's an anti-libertarian, anti-right-wing position.

But there are a whole bunch of others, just this hollowed-out coal town is voting right-wing, and then data center comes to town, and they see it as, you know, just making their town worse off and benefiting, like, the coastal elites and, like, the... People have liked to do that both sides are using AI to create graphics. to oppose data centers. That's true. Yeah, there's all these, like, deep ironies. There's a whole piece on someone who's protesting data centers and using a lot of AI to

research how she can push back. Gabe says data centers need to be rebranded to Data Ranch. Data Ranch. I like a data ranch. That's a good one. Ox. We got ox powered. Oh, interesting.

Salty says that Leopold sold Blue Energy in the latest 13F. Tremed. Or trimmed. So if that's the case, then there you go. The latest debate that I saw was over this huge data center in Utah that's being championed by Shark Tank's Mr. Wonderful. Kevin O'Leary, are you familiar with this whole thing? Yeah, someone dug into like the plan, and the plan actually seems pretty reasonable. But Mr. Wonderful, he's sort of an over-the-top caricature of a businessman.

Like, he plays one on TV. He is a real businessman, but he also plays a businessman on TV. And so he's a bit of a soft target. Like he was recently seen sporting not one, but two. expensive watches, not unlike Tyler Cosgrove over there. He went to the Oscars wearing a Cartier Crash Skeleton and a Ruby Rolex or Daytona. And I believe he also had a like a trading card around his neck. So very ostentatious, very over the top, a very soft target if you're looking for someone to target in like he's doing it for the money. You know, it's pretty, pretty easy.

And so if you want to paint data center construction as maybe not in the best interest of average Americans. Kevin Leary is going to do a lot of that, a lot of the heavy. Mr. Wonderful in the context of developing large scale infrastructure that people are afraid of sounds like a supervillain too. Yes. And also like we can put this in contrast to Eric Schmidt or Tim Cook where the previous generation like the major hypers like the big tech companies. They've done a pretty good job building a lot of infrastructure making really, really bold climate plow plow. saying we're going to be net zero by this year. Our data centers are really clean.

They built a lot of data centers without really any disruption. There was no backlash to Google Cloud through 15 years or 10 years of building AWS. And so now- But neither of them were rocking dual iced out. So you made the case for quiet luxury. The quiet luxury of a Tim Cooker and Eric Schmidt. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, in this case, it seems like-

Mr. Wonderful is not the guy to be the face of- Potentially not. But apparently his actual data center plans are reasonable. It actually seems pretty by the book, according to current plans. It's in a remote area. It uses its own power and water. And it doesn't seem to disrupt any local communities. We can pull up this video from quick thoughts that has a little bit of a breakdown. Million views complaining about a giant data center in Utah. And I'm kind of confused by that because I would think that an uninhabited desert valley in Utah is perfect place to build a giant data center. I've been following really closely what's happening in Box Elder County, Utah, where Canadian

billionaire Kevin O'Leary is trying to build the world's largest data center, a $100 billion project, okay? This would be the largest data center in the world at over 40,000 acres. And at full capacity, the data center, which is called the Strato's project, is set to use nine gigawatts of electricity. Gigabytes, you saw that? The entire amount of electricity used by huge optimization. She said it correctly.

Yeah, yeah, but the transcripts said gigabytes, which is funny. AI fails. Again, we need another data center to fix that. Steve in the X-Chat says, TBPN studio uses the equivalent of 23 atomic bombs of energy to produce niche technology content. What is the project area is so large is because they are buying water rights of the current property owners. So the current property owners are using water for agricultural irrigation. The Data Center project buys that land, buys a huge amount of land.

See, he makes this sound good, but then it's like, wait, are we going to have less food? That doesn't seem that good. The point is that it's not taking it from, like, someone who is going to be paying water or some local community. It's like there's already water rights there that are staying in that valley. It's not drawing power from the grid. If we look at electricity consumption by state, we can. can see that Utah just doesn't use that much electricity compared to other states.

There are plenty of states that use double or triple. Tennessee is about triple Pennsylvania four times. Texas is like 10 times, more than 10 times what Utah uses. So if over the course of this project they reach their goal and they double or triple Utah's electricity usage, so why is that bad? It's not incurring more cost to the people of Utah because they're building their own power plan. By Utah as a whole. Robert Davies, a physics professor from Utah State University, says that he actually thinks the project will require an additional 7 to 8 gigawatts of waste heat

energy, meaning that the project in total will be 23 gigawatts of total thermal energy, which is the equivalent of dropping 23 atom bones in Utah every single day. Also, let's... Okay, electricity generation across every state is going to have that same. thermal load property. Not every generator is perfectly efficient, so they're going to generate waste heat as well. So if you say, okay, we're going to have 23 atom bombs a day worth of electricity going off in Utah. Well, then currently we have 230 atom bombs a day going off in Texas. You've got to put everything in the atom bomb comparison. Like your car is like the size of like five atom bombs. It's like an atom bomb is like maybe this big, maybe a little bit bigger.

Yeah. Your car weighs as much as seven atom bombs. That's right. It makes it sound so much more like weighty when you're like... Maths. Just comparing everything to Adam bombs. By 28 degrees. This is actually pretty crazy. 28 degrees feels like a lot.

Daytime temperature could increase 2 to 5 degrees throughout Hansel Valley, not the state of Utah, the valley where the data center is being built. Same with nighttime temperature could increase up to 28 degrees trapped in the valley. Hansel Valley is an uninhabited desert valley. So if you build a big power plant here and a big data center here, maybe it'll increase the temperature of this valley by five degrees. But, okay, nobody lives there. I think this project solves a lot of people's stated concerns with data centers. You're worried about water usage.

They're reallocating agricultural water to cool the data center. Worryed about power costs. They're building their power costs. That one line is not helping. But I like vegetables. valley where it's already hot. And you're worried about this is such a huge project. This is a giant data center or something, world's biggest data center. Well, that's just data centers that don't have to be built in other places that are being built in this uninhabited desert valley. I think the concerns

in her video are just fearmongering for reasons that I hope I've explained here. Thanks for your time. I guess the question is they say that there's water for agricultural usage right now in that valley, but the valley's uninhabited and it seems like a desert. So it doesn't seem like they're growing food there. So like, where is that water actually going? Because it's just getting piped to some other farm, like far away? Or was it like they were planning to farm? So way, way, way back in the day, way back in the day, you could just have a piece of land, you could drill a while and you could pull up as much water as you want it. Yeah. And then people realize that if you have a property here, yeah, and there's property here, here, here, here, here, here, there are oftentimes all

pulling from the same aquifer. So you, all of a sudden, if you come in, you move in next to and you start pumping billions of gallons. I drink your milkshake. Yeah, you're drinking my milkshake. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up. And so it's very possible that all these parcels of land, which they collectively bought,

they all have their own water rights. That doesn't mean they're being used, right? Because people will sell their water rights to like a neighboring property that is... But my question is like, sounds like they sold the way water rights previously or they had some sort of deal to send the water that they were getting out of desert, which I can't imagine produces that much water, but I guess it does use it for like agricultural purposes. Like what were they growing? Well, agricultural could mean you have some like you have some

cattle. Like there's a bunch of different potential meanings for that. It doesn't mean you're growing fresh produce. But were they actively using or were they just like, no, that's the other thing. That's the other thing too. It could have been agricultural land. Yeah. But not. Could have been like a failed farm. It's not farming anymore, like a former livestock like farm, something like that. But I don't know. These points like as you said, I think are going to be hard to break through just because AI is so deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons. And we should watch the video of Eric Schmidt getting booed on stage at University of Arizona. He says this is incredible artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement

speech, it's mentioned in maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs. Wasn't the best strategy. Let's watch this clip. The architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. Boom. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know, we do not know the precise contours of what this, if you'd let me make this point, please.

Step one. If you're giving the command of procedure, you've got to bring a soundblower. Yeah, it would be like AI, yeah, it's not that bad, but also, I hear you. They're really going crazy. There's just a low-level boo the whole time. It's so rowdy. Like, normally you'd think there'd be like a little bit of boo and then they just like get quiet down, okay? This is about to turn into a riot.

This is crazy. Did he just bail on this thing? No. No. You have only seen. At this point, I mean, you got to go off script. You can't stay. It is funny that if you cut it up in the right way, you could make it seem sound like

the most people. Also, it would be real. You will surrender your agency. Yeah. The big thing is like, I don't know that that is, like, everyone is booing for a slightly different reason, but it's like this ensemble of problems and grievances with AI generally. Like, one thing that I'm, that I've been, like, frustrated about, is everyone is vibe coding like 24-7, leaving Macbooks open, talking about like productivity.

And yet the like the magical moments, the consumer technology has been like completely left behind. There was a time when we got the cloud, we were building a lot of data centers. But every year you'd get like a cool new thing like Yelp would come out. And it was like it wasn't changing the world, but it was like, oh, you could find a cool new restaurant. And maybe like or Groupon. Like Groupon was like not a great business ultimately. But like for the first couple months of Greece, You could like go try a restaurant for like half price and it just felt like magical or like Uber when that came out.

It was like, wait, I can go out and call a taxi cab service. Maybe it comes. Maybe it doesn't stand outside in the cold, try and flag a car. There were all these things. Do you think they were like angry at usage, nano banana usage limit? Probably. Probably. Is that this whole thing just a misunderstanding? They might think we're in a plateau and they might just be upset with the lack of progress outside of coding domains. Yeah, the writing is just still. not that good on any of these models. I can clock it. Yeah, it's still clockable. Yeah. At first, I thought they were mad that like at Google, Eric Schmidt was, he was doing too many, you know, stock buybacks instead of investing in. Too much cash in the balance sheet. Yeah. Yeah. Having a hundred billion on the balance sheet and cash is just unacceptable. Like yes, you get waymo. Yes, you get deep mine. Yeah, because it just says they don't know what to do with the money. Yeah. Yeah, they weren't innovating for a long time. And that makes a lot of sense why you would boo them sort of the tealian. The tealian boo. Just in those. Just in those,

a handful of sentences, like, is that, that felt like a speech more potentially, like, oriented towards maybe like the Stanford student body, which is like, how are you going to contribute to AI? That's what I was like, that's what was standing out to me. Yeah. Being like, don't be afraid of this thing, like jump in. Yeah. And help shape it. Yeah. And if you're maybe someone in Stanford, yeah. And you have the opportunity to go actually, be involved and you're at the epicenter of all this progress. Maybe that would land. Yeah. But at U of A where people are hearing like, hey, all the different career paths that I'm thinking about. I would prefer, in terms of commencement speaker, I would prefer someone like a Sam

Seleck to give the commencement speech. People don't want other stuff built generally. Like there's very, very, very few things that people are like, yeah, I'd be down for that to be built. People, people like the status quo. They're happy with things as they are and they don't like change. So, Like, anything new is going to be, like, somewhat unpopular as nuclear power was. Not building out nuclear power 50 years ago was, of course. One of the greatest mistakes humanity has made and one that contributes directly to data center opposition today, given questions about the impact on energy bills. We have to do this another time.

But, you know, did we run out of nuclear scientists? Was that what stopped the build out? Did we not have enough geniuses? I don't know. Maybe. We'll dig into it. People are saying homes in the chat, but then it. Again, people don't really want more homes in their area once they already own a home.

They block them all the time. They block home construction all the time. And also permitting and also expansion of existing homes. Like these things, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they're like as unpopular as data centers. No way. Data centers are at the bottom. But homes are something, maybe in the abstract, but like new housing in communities is like razor's edge, 50-50, 60-40.

Like it's, like there is a lot of opposition to build. just in America, broadly. Like, that's just the nature of our society. So, Ben Thompson has some solutions, though. What do you got to do to build the data center properly? He says, first, this sounds obvious, but tech needs to fix its messaging problem, the issue, and if an answer seems obvious, then there surely must be some other problem at play is threefold. First, a good number of people in tech, particularly at one of the leading labs,

genuinely believe most jobs are going away. They could lie more effectively, but beyond being dishonest, It's also a betrayal of the fanatical devotion with which they are pursuing AI despite obstacles, including the challenge of spending billions and billions of dollars on models that are obsolete in months, if not weeks. Second, it is extremely hard to describe the benefits of inventions not yet made. Cures not yet discovered, economic activity, not yet engaged in, etc. This is always the burden of those arguing in favor of progress and the sheer potential of AI actually makes the problem even harder.

50 years ago, everyone was like, electricity isn't that? expensive? Why do we need to build nuclear power plants? They're scary. And now electricity is expensive and we're like, oh, we should have built those. That's the way these things always go. Third, tech is and always has been terrible at understanding and relating to the rest of society. I go back to how Silicon Valley was extremely skeptical of Facebook, a company predicated on connecting with friends and family, precisely because it's filled with people running away from their friends and family. You can optimistically say that people in tech live in the future. You can also more cynically say they live in opposition to and denial of humanity for better and in this case for worse

Second tech could control the misinformation TikTok is a major point of this he talks about how the the algorithm is still controlled by the Chinese and maybe there's misinformation there Second in a rather ironic twist Meta has learned the lesson of trying to control misinformation Doesn't want to overtly censor but now the company gets no credit for not censoring misinformation about data centers. And so it's like this weird thing. And then third, this was a wild card, which I didn't think of, but X is the social media platform X and Twitter, formerly Twitter, is actually incentivized to be anti-data center

in a weird way because X is owned by SpaceX and a big part of SpaceX's upcoming public offering is the possibility of building data centers in space. This is like total tinfoil hat, I think, but it's an interesting like, okay. And he says, to be clear, he hasn't seen any evidence of thumb on the scale or not. I certainly haven't. But, you know, part of the problem, though, is that we would never know if there were. He goes on to propose something very, very bold, very, very bold. He says, instead, the most obvious solution is the most crass.

Simply start giving people money. Not universal basic income, though. If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. If that data center up the road weren't sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits, that my local government may or may not spend appropriately. I was talking to Tyler about this earlier, but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year, I suspect you could get a lot of people on board.

So he put some numbers together, and he says for the data center up the road, it was expected to be 1.6 gigawatts, which could generate around $3 billion in annual operator revenue. Deforest, the village it was to be built in, has around 11,500 people. So you could pay every person, in that village, $10,000 a year, and it would only equate to 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the

data center. And he says, I bet that that proposal would have been approved, and I bet the operator could very easily pass on those costs to actual data center users. It also highlights how relatively pathetic the original commitment that I think the data center said, hey, we'll give you $50 million, which is like nowhere near what that math works out to. So data center is coming to town. You get to vote for it, but the data center company says, hey, we'd like you to vote for this,

and we will give you a $10,000 check in the mail every year, forever, while we're operating this. And that seems like that could actually get people on board. So this is ridiculous. This goes back to even months ago at this point. We were saying, you know, AI is not a, is not like a, you know, natural resource where you benefit from having it in your backyard, right? If you're just an everyday AI user, you do not care where the data center is at all.

And so if someone is coming to put it in your community, it's pretty fair to want to benefit from that in some way. And like a direct payment like that, I think I'm sure that will happen more. And we will see you tomorrow. A wonderful evening. You love you. Goodbye.