TBPN Live - OpenAI Ends Side Quests, SF Housing Market is Back, Kalshi’s $1B Prize | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: March 17, 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.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCisco - https://www.cisco.comCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnKalshi - https://kalshi.comLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.com/tbpnTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow 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

Happy St. Patrick's Day. We are not drinking Guinness currently, but we hope that you are. Yeah, enjoy it. It seems like Tyler is in the St. Patrick's Day mood and is wearing a fantastic St. Patrick's Day hat. I'm thinking of my hat. How did you wind up here? That's a nice hat. Where did that come from? Did we just have that? No, I had this. Oh, you just have it. You had it. You just daily drive that. Yeah. Okay, yeah. It wasn't in your car? Yeah, we're it to the gym this morning.

Okay. In the news, the Wall Street Journal has an article about, this is a scoop from Berber Gin. We didn't have to break down the paywall, but Berber Jin has a scoop. It says, Open AI's Fiji Simo told staff last week that the company could not afford to be distracted by side quests, main quest only. Main quest only. What is the main quest? Probably just scaling compute, but we'll get into that. And there's a whole bunch of takes back and forth, said the company execs are actively looking at

areas to deprioritize. Of course, throughout last year, Open AI launched a ton of different initiatives across consumer hardware. And I think a lot of people were starting to say, like, okay, like, do you want to be fighting a battle on all these different fronts, or do you want to just really nail consumer, nail enterprise, and now that is what they are signaling internally. So from the Wall Street Journal article, Open AITI's top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a do everything all at once. Strategy has put them on the defensive. Fiji Seimo, OpenAIC of CEO of applications previewed the changes to employees at an all-hands meeting telling

them that top leaders, including Sam Altman and Mark Chen, were actively looking at which areas to deprioritize. They expect to notify staff about the changes in the coming weeks. We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests. Side quests is the key term there. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front. Last year, Open AI announced an array of new products, including the video generator SORA, a web browser called Atlas, a new hardware device, and e-commerce features for chat GPT.

Some of those are wildly different timelines for these things. Yeah, and remember during this time, that's when I started talking about viewing opening eyes activities like they were a hyperscaler, right? When Google launches a new product, you don't have to assume that, hey, it's gonna work every single time,

and in fact it's the exact opposite. a lot of these experiments don't end up going anywhere. It's fine. Like, again, you have this, like, massively scaling, you know, core business. You start to say, like, hey, let's experiment in a bunch of these different areas. Some of them are going to work. Some aren't. It's okay.

But then ultimately, that creates a scenario where you're sort of, like, opening up maybe too many fronts, right, to the competition, right? You're competing with meta and social with SORA. You're competing with Google in some ways. You're competing with even like the Microsofts of the world in other ways and Ultimately this just feels like hey let's like narrow the fronts and I think a lot of people expected something like this or the last few months OTP in the chat is surfacing a very interesting old take from Ben Thompson about opening I should not be in the API business and now based on the way things look it it originally that was like oh wait well maybe Microsoft will be able to handle and scale the API demand and

But API demand has been so huge, and it's allowed Anthropic to develop such a solid business there that it's undeniable that Open AI should also be in the API business, especially. Yeah, the other side of that is like they clearly need to be in the harness business too, which is why Codex is. Yeah, yeah. And so the hyperscaler, like your take of think about Open AI as the new is the new hyperscaler. I think that I think it aged extremely well, especially with recent interviews. with Dylan Patel and Dorkech. Jensen just went on Sturtecary. There's a whole bunch of new data points that show how compute constrained we are, how tricky it will be, how chips will be the key bottleneck. There's that interesting story that Tyler was recounting from Dylan Patel about how

the TPU was developed by the TPU team. DeepMind didn't realize how important it was going to be, how compute constrained they were going to be. So the TPU went and sold it to Anthropic, and then DeMind went back to them and it was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, we want those chips. Like, we need the chips. particularly about the ability to marshal compute at hyper scale. I was interested to look at like the history of side quests among Mag 7 companies, among trillion dollar tech companies, because it's all over the place.

And so it's very hard to paint with a broad brush. I think right now there's a huge narrative around like opening I was doing way too many side quests. They need to do zero side quests. And the reality is probably like, you know, we've seen this with Riley Walls joining the labs team. Like there will be small projects.

There will be acquisitions. there will be a continuum of bets. There's just a level of refocusing that's going on right now. Yeah. And reorganization, and this has happened at many, many things. Yeah, and I think that with the Open AI Labs team is you have a really small group of people that are focused on creating or being quick to new product, like approaches. But that can be, again, like a two pizza team.

Yep. And that type of experimentation is going to make more sense if the rest of the company needs to refocus on enterprise and the core business. History of side quests in tech. Can we paint with a broad brush here? You know, spoiler alert, I think the answer is no. But there are some fascinating stories. So Google has a balloon internet play that's a serious company called Project Loon where they inflate balloons that go into the stratosphere, I believe. They go high up and then they deliver internet, sort of competitive Starlink. They also have the fiber play too. Oh yeah, they just sold that. That's not even close to the weirdest thing. The weirdest, Google's, Google, side project that I found is they make a contact lens that will tell you how drunk you are. I'm not kidding about this. Google, they have a project. It does more than that. It's supposed to do biometrics and it can do a lot of different things. But one of the things that it can measure, it can measure glucose in your tears, it can measure any sort of like biomarker that's in your

tears, which apparently is like a rich source of data. But one of them is blood alcohol level. So you can put in this contact lens from Google and it will tell you how Dr. Jarvis. Am I drunk? Am I good? Am I good? Am I good to drive? You're absolutely not. He's like, sir. Sir, you should take away Moe tonight. Would you like me to connect you? See, this is all part of the plan. They also briefly own Boston Dynamics, but most importantly, they bought DeepMind, which was completely seen as like this wild card side project. How does that fit in? It's a bunch of researchers and then it became like the most critical thing in. Amazon has taken tons of shots, a drone-related delivery and home security stuff.

They also own Twitch, but they never really linked the site to live shopping and closed that loop. Have you thought that that's weird? And Jassy doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch. He doesn't do earnings calls on Twitch. Of course, Apple. Try to build a car, then pulled out. Who knows where the Apple Vision Pro goes, although, of course, I hope it continues. I'm hoping for another Apple Vision Pro.

Apple Vision Air, just make it lighter. Same screen. That's the trick. Make it like $1,000. I think it'll sell. And they have a bunch of health moonshots. They've been working on non-invasive glucose monitoring, which is there's some book about it called like the white whale of biotech or something.

It's something that people have been working on for so long and they've never been able to crack it. The best thing I think they have is that you can get a continuous glucose monitor. Thank you for the W's in the chat, by the way. There's a lot of Ws in the chat. You can get a continuous glucose monitor that is invasive, meaning it is pricking you, it is measuring your blood and then calculating the amount of glucose in that. And you can wirelessly connect that now to your Apple Watch, but they can't do it in the Apple Watch. There's always been the question about, like, could you just shine a light through your skin and detect the blood, the glucose in the blood?

Very, very difficult to do. Lots of money spent with little to show for it, at least so far. Meta is probably the most, you know, egregious side quests. They don't do side quests, they do full quests. They create side quests in VR. There's actually one of the popular games. It's all about doing side quests. And yeah, I mean, they bought Oculus, they bought a bunch of VR studios, they roll everything up,

they renamed the company, spent tens of billions of dollars on what is starting to feel like less of a side quest, but still is so early. You know, the meta-ray bands are like a success, but to the tune of millions of units, not, you know, billions of units or anything like that or hundreds of millions of units. I think the iPhone has an install base over a billion now, and the ramp from here to there on meta raybans is going to be long. Tesla launched a premium tequila in a lightning bolt-shaped bottle. So, you know, it comes for all different Mac 7 companies. But truly, like, side quests come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just good for morale. Like, it's just fun. We do sidequests here

all day long. TbPN simulator, that's a side quest. What was the other simulator? Jeremy Giffon simulator. That was a side quest. You know, they're just fun. Some of them are good for marketing, good for attention, good for fun. Some are complete dumpster fires where you just pour money in and It just sucks all resources and you get nothing out. And then some reshape businesses entirely. DeepMind's a great example. And there's certainly others in the Mag 7 that have really, really changed the business. It seems like the entire boring company is a side quest.

Yeah, it's technically a separate company. But Elon's, yeah, king of side quest. Although, I think it feels like the company that gets the least amount of attention that's not like on the critical path for many of the other projects. Totally. Absolutely. Some of OpenAI's teams come from very small teams with relatively tiny compute budgets, but they get a lot of attention sometimes because of the particular product category.

So, SOAR is a great example where small team, not huge resource investment, probably a lot of inference and training cost, but relative to codex 5.4 SPAR? I don't know. I don't know how we're looking on the order of magnitude there. Yeah, I think a big part of it is like... Super viral, right? And what percentage of the team? team, the overall team's energy is going towards a specific product.

Yeah, yeah. So the idea of experimenting quickly and then consolidating efforts even faster makes a ton of sense. Nano banana was a big deal for Gemini, bringing image, video, and audio generation together in a single chat GPT flow is clearly the next step. And so some of this is not, it's probably not going to take the form of like stop doing the side quest. It's like, let's fold that into the main quest because clearly the interaction pattern of chat GPT is, is where people want to go. And so once we've done the experiment, it works, put it all together.

Dylan Patel and Dorcash said the TAM for GPT 5.4 was north of $100 billion, which is crazy for a bunch of reasons. I mean, it's just a huge market that was created in just a few years. The enterprise opportunity in general is crystal clear for anyone involved. At the same time, you still do need to experiment to make sure you are early to create the next breakout product experience. And so with that backdrop, opening eye labs and being more efficient with the shots on goal makes a lot of sense. I still think that the overall narrative around AI, just in AI broadly this year, will be about the main quest, which I see as like compute scaling. Raise the money, do the deals, grow the capacity.

I was thinking back to Travis on the show saying, if you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. The key is if money matters, which I think we say, we would say it does, especially in certain categories. He was probably thinking of ride sharing where there was a capital war and AI compute, where there's also a capital war. You need to be the best in the world at it. Yeah.

Yeah. overall, there's real competition now. Yeah. It's intense, right? You have Open AI Anthropic at the frontier, pushing very, very hard. But the other side of this for Open AI is like, yes, there was a ton of stuff that was announced last year. There was, there was hardware, SORA, etc.

But Sam was running around doing all these different mega deals for the compute side that now served the main quest. And so the positioning is actually great. Google Capital bloke, the longtime Google Bowl, says, so Anthropic and Open AI are going to just give the security. consumer market to Google. And I don't know how, how, I mean, yes, they're like, like open AI reportedly planning to shift the strategy to refocus around business users and vibe coders. There's a lot of stuff going on there. Listening to some of the data around the retention curve

of the various products, like I don't think that they're giving up on consumer at all. That seems like sort of an odd read. Yeah. And we can pull up this chart that Sam showed of codex usage. This is like the, again, this is like what I think is informing the battle with Anthropic, as well as like this chart is going to inform the strategy shift, which is like, hey, we can run, we can take revenue into the hundreds of billions of dollars with the current products that we have. Let's focus on them and make the best possible products. In other news, OpenAIs forming a joint venture with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital, and Brookfield Asset Management.

This is great news. To form a joint venture. We're going to be a child. Enterprise products across the firm's portfolio companies and beyond the proposed deal as a free money value. AI is coming to Fogo to Chau. Bain Capital owns Fogo de Chau, the Brazilian Steakhouse. Maybe now they can take Apple Pay. Oh yeah, we got cooked on that.

Maybe they deliberately don't. I wonder if Apple Pay is expensive for them, and this is actually a cost consideration. Fiji CMO said this news came out a little bit earlier than we planned. We're excited to be building a deployment arm and we'll share more details soon. Companies have a ton of urgency to deploy AI in their organizations and we're sprinting to meet that to make that to make. more than one million businesses run on Open AI products. Codex is now at 2 million weekly active users, up nearly 4x since the start of the year.

API usage jumped 20% in the week after GPT 5.4 watch launched in Frontier, which launched last month, to help enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI coworkers that can do real work, has way more demand than we can handle. That's why we launched Frontier alliances, so we leverage our ecosystem of partners in scale to scale, and that is also why we're launching

a dedicated deployment arm tasked with embedding for deployed engineers deeply inside enterprises. This project has been in the works with our investors and alliance partners since last December, and we are grateful for them and their partnership. We're still early, but the speed of adoption is a clear signal of where this is headed. We're excited to not just be building these technologies, but also building many ways for companies to deploy them and get impact. There was a big talk for a long time about like the next gen private equity firm will

buy businesses and like deploy AI inside them. And this feels like, well, maybe. that works at the mid-market private equity level, but you don't necessarily need a new AI native private equity firm because Bain Capital- Yeah, this is what I've always said, like, traditional private equity is not, it's not going to just be like, oh, we'll figure out AI in like 2030, it's not really on a roadmap right now. They're working as hard as they can to implement it. The question is like, will, will traditional private equity be able to basically, like, roll out and unlock the value of AI better than some of these like AI-native, more like

venture oriented roll-ups. What is the pitch for a mini or a nano model? Someone ran some evals and the mini models are like equivalent to GPT5 when that first came out. But it's just way cheaper, right? So if you're like consensitive, if you're running a ton, a ton of queries, but they don't need to be like the max intelligence than you just use this.

So cheaper, but also faster? Yes, probably, yes. And potentially runs on older hardware? I think that's unclear. This is bullish for our vintage NeoCloud, the oldest GPUs ever made. Yeah, this was a crazy idea yesterday. Yeah, we're going to run this on 1080 TIs.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, doesn't, like, how small the model is doesn't actually, like, matter on what hardwale. Imagine running your vintage neocloud with wood-fired hearth, powering it all. Yeah. I mean, you have to imagine that, what's after Blackwell? What's the one that announced today? Farah Ruben.

Ruben. Like, you have to imagine that there will be models that only run on Rubin and need to be sort of re-architectedected to run on Hopper, I would imagine. Sure. I mean, I think there's like small performance boost that you can get. Or it might just be slower. But you can always, you can run any model on like any hardware. It's just like, it could be like way, way slower.

Way, way slower. The memories on a fleet of A100s. You could just be on like a smaller rack of Rubens. Interesting. What did Cal She launch? Cal She launched the $1 billion perfect bracket challenge. One billion dollars for a perfect March Madness bracket. So you can win $1 billion for,

entering this competition? I haven't read the fine print, but it is positioned that way. Vinnie says it would be hilarious if Citadel built out a team to attempt to financially impair their competitors. Sig Paramedrics from Susquehanna is basically like the financial backer for this promotion. So if Citadel can figure this out, they could leave their competitor with a $1 billion bill. Obviously trying to nail the perfect bracket. is functionally impossible. So there are nine quintillion possible brackets. So the odds of a perfect bracket are one in nine quintillion.

And I believe that they are capping entries. I like my odds. I like my odds. I like my odds. And I believe that they are capping entries at 10 million entries. So if you math that out and then you take some insurance out, like you should be able to, you know, hedge out any of the risk. If you are good and you don't suffer from any skill issues,

you can basically, with strong basketball knowledge, if you have ball knowledge, apparently you can get the odds down to like one in 10 billion. And at that, you know, not from nine quintillion to 10 billion, now we're talking. If you have nonquantillion and you can sort them by how likely they are, take the top 10 million. That's, you know, maybe there's some kind of power law thing here

where we actually, you're getting your odds are good. We get close, but I think if there's 10 million, If there's 10 million, like assume that there's 10 billion reasonable brackets and out of the nine quintillion. So you're discarding like all the craziest upsets to get to that 10 billion. You already ranked it and narrowed it down by like, what, six orders of magnitude or something. And then you're submitting the top 10 million of those 10 billion. Like your odds of winning are still one in a thousand. You can make it a thousand accounts.

And that's a, no, no, no. I think that they are capping the entire campaign to the first 10 million entries. So you have to be on Kalshi. My open claw already submitted. The SEC prepares proposal to eliminate quarterly reporting if you liked earnings. I was thinking like this bad for us. We like earnings days, but it's not like our whole schick. So I think we'll be okay.

We will continue soldiering on. Good Alexander says finally less transparency around financial results. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if this is going to be enough to make it easier to be a public company. It's certainly a burden, but the kind of shareholder lawsuit risk and all that other stuff feels like a much bigger burden. What this is you're just going to do is create more volatility, right? If you're only getting updates twice a year, you can just see these like massive swings because it's like, hey, we haven't heard from this management team in a formal capacity for six months. the business could have, you know, changed wildly, you know, growth rates fluctuating,

et cetera. And so again, if you if you love volatility, you're probably going to love this. So it's good for the VIX. That's bullish for VIX investors out there. There is a world where, I mean, the typical like public versus private debate is that when you're private, you can think in multiple years, depending on who your investors are, maybe think in decades even. Whereas when you're in the public markets, you need to think in quarters. And so advancing that from quarterly to six months and you start putting management teams in, okay, what can we deliver that will show up in six months, as opposed to what can we deliver that shows up in three months?

That's twice as long. It feels like you could wind up with better run companies doing more ambitious things. I don't know. There is a bulk of it. Yeah, I mean, the other side of it is you just get more complacency. There's less of that. You're not like on the daily March. You know, you finish earnings and you're like, okay, 90 days, we got to do this again.

Like there's no days off kind of thing. So are you an advocate for monthly reporting? Daily. Daily earnings calls. Potentially hourly. Just put, I mean, this is the crypto folks. They're like put it on the blockchain. I want to be able to see you in real time the revenues of this asset stream and how things are moving around.

I want full transparency at all times as an investor. I don't know. Nvidia. Envideo. Enouncing Nvidia DLSSS. five and aia powered breakthrough and visual fidelity for games coming this fall video games are going to get more realistic prepare over the next couple decades this is going to be this is it's entirely possible this happens continue uh let's pull up the video it's funny because when i when i

see the video i want to see the video yeah i my my thought was weren't video games already this realistic but i haven't played video games besides tetris on the dramatic they oh yeah long time so let's Play, G-Force R-TX, DLSS-S-5. DLSS, of course, stands for Deep Learning, Super Shading, something like that, DLSS. It uses deep learning. It's used AI for a long time. The whole pitch for DLSS. Super sampling.

Super sampling has always been go from a 720P render to 4K, up-res, just interpolate the pixels. This is different. You can see that it's not just becoming higher resolution. It is becoming Gen AI. Like there is a world where you render that at higher-res the lighting is changing the shading is changing the makeup the structure of that person's face is changing but it's still driven by the underlying why are you posting the bubbles because I'm ranting I want to see you're not less as 5 do this oh yeah but but this is what we were talking about yesterday we were like what will it take to get tbPN simulator photo real I think we should try and pipe it through DLSS 5 Although, who knows what this is going to run on because Nvidia is not shipping new graphics cards to gamers or something like that. They're delaying the next gaming graphics card.

People are upset. There's a community note that has yet to be accepted, but the community notes are not happy. Like one of the community notes is just AI slop. And it's like, yeah, like that's in the name. It's deep learning. Like what do you think the DL stands for? And also, why are we on DLSS-5? Oh, because this is like a decade-old technology?

I don't know. People are very upset. One of the community knows, AI technology has disasters effects on the environment. The majority of gamers did not ask for this. Is that are those the most photorealistic video games that we have today? And then they're showing how they're even getting more realistic. No, no, no.

Yeah, because they don't look, they look like games that are kind of like animated characters that aren't trying to be photo real. So there's a range of games there that some of them have pretty outdated engines, pretty outdated, outdated rendering pipelines. Some of them are on the latest and greatest and look very high fidelity. There's also a whole bunch of trade-offs in game development around the scale of what you're building and how many poker chips you want to put into great graphics. If you're making some moody first-person shooter that's going to be dark and there's going to be lots of, you know, like blood splattering and aliens and stuff like, you know, you're

could potentially make it ultra photo real. But if you're trying to build like something like Minecraft that's like this massive world that's interacted with a ton of different people like by narrowing down the scope like the beauty of Minecraft was that the whole thing's voxel based which is like these little blocks and so the so the computer can store like an entire world very efficiently because all it needs to say is just there's a cube there and it's green. There's a cube there and it's black. There's a cube there and it's gray. What do you think? I was going to say Minecraft is a good example of what this

improve right yes go to the next post oh yes yes yes this is what my craft could look like this is what my craft could look like there are there are drawbacks obviously because you're driving the the style transfer from the particular images from the shape you're not reconstructing the entire image you're just applying this like re-rendering on top of the underlying structure and so you can get really weird outcomes like this take us to space jensen Let's listen to Jensen talking about data centers in space. Courtesy of Nick. I'll spend very little time on this time.

However, we're going to space. We've already been out in space. Thor is radiation approved, and we're in satellites. You do imaging from satellites in the future. We'll also build data centers in space. Obviously, very complicated to do so. We're working with our partners on a new computer called Vera Rubin Space One, and it's going to go out to space

and start data centers out in space. Now, of course, in space, there's no conduction, there's no convection, there's just radiation. And so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space, but we've got lots of great... I'll spend very little... Got lots of great engineers working on it.

It was very funny listening to Dylan Patel talk about space data centers and saying that, like, yeah, even if you solve everything, like it's still hard to make chips. It's just like it still comes down to the chip bottle net. above above all else yeah I mean this is why you see Elon doing the TerraFab thing right yeah yeah I really want to know what his plan is for that because has he put in an order for a tool or is he gonna do Terra ASML like

because there's like the supply chain is what 10,000 companies I mean historically they've done they've gone super super early in the supply chain right sure and like mining stuff and yeah yeah yeah speaking of Dylan Patel semi-analysis was featured at at NVIDIA GTC, the inference king has been crowned. NVIDIA won a massive belt and it looks like Jensen's holding it up. He is in fact standing in front of a LED wall or projector, but a beautiful thing to see the semi-analysis logo. It's all WWE.

The entire world is W.W.E. It's so good. NVIDIA Extreme Co-design, revolutionized token cost, the GB NBL 72 is the inference King with 50x higher performance per watt on inference X by semi-analysis, 35x lower cost. Very, very exciting and congrats to Jensen for becoming the inference king and winning the inference max award or inference X as it's now known. Jensen is also confirming what we see in our GPU availability data. There is an epic scramble for compute, B-200 basically unavailable, availability for GH, Grace Hopper,

200 H-200 and A-100 also collapsing. Low availability means high demand. And people were kind of going back joking about like, he said like one trillion of demand or something over some period of time and people were like, oh, so he's guiding down. It's like, I guess that's where we're at. Yeah, it's hard when you're doing,

when you're doing cumulative revenue. Let's move over to a much smaller deal for Netflix and Warner Brothers. and the final deal which went to Paramount, of course, and David Zazlov is in the Wall Street Journal. David Zazlov deal pay could top $800 million after last minute tax benefit. So Warner Brothers Chief Executive, David Zazlov,

could collect more than $800 million in severance and other payments after rival Paramount acquires the company. The sum includes cash in payments for options and restricted stock holdings, as well as a newly adopted tax reimbursement for Zazlov. In a securities disclosure filed late Monday, the total doesn't include the more than 20 million he's likely to get for shares he owns outright, so he's been investing as well.

About $504 million is due to Zazlov if the deal closes, the company said, while $47 million would be triggered if he is fired or leaves under circumstances within a year of the close. $116 million in equity has already vested, some $335 million would only kick in if other payments trigger a 20% federal excise tax on golden pay. parachute severance payments he receives. The ultimate value of the payout is based on tax code rules that are expected to cause it to significantly decline with the passage of time, the company said in a filing. Without the tax payment, the total would be about $667 million.

Companies typically try to keep severance at or below three-time salary and target annual bonus to avoid or minimize the tax, and investors often criticize companies for reimbursing or grossing up executives for the tax. the company said Zazlov wouldn't have to pay the excise tax if the deal closes in 2027, which would save the company costs of the tax gross up. Yeah, a lot of people are absolutely. Did he earn that? Yeah, absolutely pissed.

And the reason that I think it is warranted from a business standpoint is when we were sitting here last year talking with someone who won't be named in the media space, somebody who has done, he was sitting here telling us at this very table that, he didn't think there would be any bidding process at all. Yeah. And it was just going to land with the Ellison's for a pretty predictable price. Yeah. And Zazlov did his job as CEO to get the best possible price for shareholders. And it's remarkable. And that is why, you know, he was able to have outsized impact. He's getting he's getting outsized compensation. He increased the enterprise value through his deal making by tens of billions of dollars. he's getting a significant but I think warranted payment. And if you don't like this,

then you probably don't like the game of business very much either. Well, thank you for tuning in to TBPN today. We will see you tomorrow. Go have the best. Maybe you have a fitness. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It has been an honor. Why don't you throw that flashbang?

We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.