TBPN - Diet TBPN: November 3, 2025

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

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The timeline has been in turmoil over the Brad Gersner podcast with Sotinadella and Sam Altman. The AI buildout is so big, even a haunted house owner wants in. The co-owner of Pennsylvania's Pennhurst Asylum has big plans for a data center. He's like, we got to get through Halloween and then I'm all in on AI. Halloween is-We've got to get through spooky season. I mean, that's basically what's-I-in. You ever been to a spirit Halloween like at like 6 p.m. on Halloween? No. Is it packed? It's an absolute nightmare.

Oh, it's probably crazy because they just let it get destroyed, basically. Like the employees are just like, all right, it's basically over. It's over. We're just going to pack it up and leave tomorrow. It looks like a stampede of horses just running through it. Apparently, haunted houses are converting into data centers. There are a number of Hollywood sound stages, studios that have been set up in Atlanta, I think she said, Georgia. And they're not monetizing well as.

studios, and so they're converting them into data centers. Trump hailed more than 92 billion AI and energy deals from the likes of Blackstone and Brookfield during a visit to Pennsylvania this year. Many say there's too much money flooding in. The big value play is getting this ready for a hyperscaler to go vertical in less than a year. I've seen enough. He should spack based on his Halloween revenue. For sure. And then use that capital to go all in. The timeline's going pretty crazy on the BG squared. He had Sotanadella and Sam Altman on the show, and everyone is debating whether or not a $14 billion revenue company,

Open AI, can afford to pay $1.4 trillion. And Brad asked this question directly. It's kind of a crazy moment because a lot of people were saying, like, well, he's an investor. This should be like the softest ball interview possible. A lot of journalists were like, how is this happening? Like, how is it that Sam Altman's like getting, it's like a harder interview with a direct investor than,

with a traditional media journalist. I don't think Brad meant for it to be a tough question. The whole interview was a layout. Brad is, like you said, he's heavily aligned with Open AI. This wasn't meant to be a gotcha. Sam just might have woken up in a bad mood that day because the answer that he gave was absolutely horrible. I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy Open AI shares.

I don't think you want to sell. Including myself. Including myself. Who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we could sell your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter, whatever, about this very quickly.

We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. The step back is growing steeply. We are taking a forward to that. It's going to continue to go. So pause for a second. I was just listening to the audio. And I was like, oh, like that's like a totally reasonable answer. But when you watch the video and you see the body language

and you get into all that, I feel like that adds a whole extra layer. Right when Sam got pressed, he went. See, you don't hear that on the audio. You don't hear that on the audio. And so you see what I'm saying, how like you can win in one medium but lose in another. Anytime I don't like something you're saying, John, I'm just going to go. Well, the audio listeners won't know. Yeah.

Won't know. And the timeline was also fixating on this fact that at some point Brad takes a step back from the microphone. They were reading into that. Like that's something that just doesn't come across in audio. And so you hear it and you're just like, okay, yeah, this actually sounds like pretty And Satya, Sotja's just sitting back laughing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was like the, it was the, one of the most strange.

I was actually surprised that, that they released it. I think it's good that it was released. Yeah. Because this is the question that is on everyone's mind. Yes. He says, how will you afford $1.4 trillion in spending with only $12 billion of revenue? And Sam was like, actually, we have more revenue than that. Of course, they lost $10 or so billion dollars last quarter.

Sam's answer was basically, sell your shares, we're automating science, and we're going to release a hardware device, and we're going to need a lot of compute for that. I can't think of a more poor answer when people deserve to have, I think, a bit more clarity around it. Sam is smart enough to not sign up for $1.4 trillion of, like, liabilities. There is a world where he can thread the needle and spend all this money that he's sort of soft committing. but everything has to go perfectly. Agenda commerce has to be massive. Ads need to be massive. Subscriptions need to keep growing at the same rate. And so a lot of things need to go right. And it was just a really weak answer. The only person that I saw defending the answer and the whole interaction was Brat. Okay. So Sam said that the revenue was incorrect. It's not $14 billion. It's higher.

It's worth noting that the losses are dramatically greater than the revenue. Yeah, but that doesn't matter for the deals because you pay the deals from the revenue. So many different businesses where their market caps are riding on their partnership with you. And you're just saying like, yeah, we're going to just hit a grand slam with a new consumer hardware device. And every other attempted it so far has not managed to make anything even really that useful. If Open AI doesn't accelerate to a trillion dollars in revenue or quadrillion dollars in revenue and all of a sudden, there's a whole bunch of folks who are like, wait a minute, like, how are you going to pay us for our cloud stuff? And they're able to say, okay, well, let's actually wind this back or let's stretch this contract out.

Let's make it a 10-year contract. Like, if all of that can happen smoothly and efficiently with just the stroke of a pen, like, it's not that big of a deal. Except if you're Oracle and you spend tens of billions of dollars building infrastructure that you ultimately can't monetize in the way that you thought you were going to monetize. And if you have that too. And they have massive debt. Yep. And so the reason I'm wearing the tinfoil hat is I would like to propose the glut theory, which is that I believe, I believe there's a chance.

Yeah. That Sam actually wants to create a massive overbuild. Yeah. So he can, he can ultimately. He predicted a glut. Because he controls a demand. Yeah. He's glut piled.

He's glut piled. It doesn't seem like they have a lot of debt. It doesn't seem like we don't know. That's the thing is that we don't know how these contracts are written. There could be an easy mutual out. It could just be like, these contracts can be revocable for convenience. If you don't pay your AWS bill, Open AI, there's $37 billion. If you don't pay it, we own the company.

You go into receivership. You go bankrupt. They're wildly different contracts. And we don't know. Open AI, I believe, will be a massive beneficiary of a glut and an overbill. Sam is entirely right. He's actually smart to say, let's focus on demand for the stock. If you want to get out, I'll help you get out.

Are you going to nuke my portfolio? And I'm going to be fine on your deal. But the rest of my portfolio is getting cooked. You could have done a few of these press releases. And there wouldn't have been as many questions. Opening eyes, Revenue Ramp is insane. They have the biggest consumer product in the last 10 years. When you announce a $100 billion deal, a $200 billion deal, another $100 billion, a $50 billion deal.

And then less than 72 hours after this interview releases, there's another $38. billion deal announced. Now is an appropriate time, I think, for people to just press them harder on this. The joke of like Open AI is holding up the stock market is incredibly real right now. I mean, I don't know what more people want, though. Like, we've been growing three acts every year. We project that we're going to continue to grow three acts. The quadrillion number is a joke, but clearly they back at the envelope to being a hyperscaler. So say that. Don't say we're automating science. Sell your shares. Elon does very similar things, right? Yeah, totally. We're going to go Mars and we're going to have a flying car. And we're going to do

trucking. We're going to do data centers in space. Elon is probably 10 to 50 times more likable than Sam. In general, Elon is more likable. And so people give him the benefit of the doubt. Longer track record of delivering on, you know, there's the, there's a thing of like Elon, you know, gets the timing wrong, but he delivered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just going to to be born. Yeah, I just think that we're going to cure cancer answer. We're automating science answer isn't good enough anymore at this scale when there's this many trillions of dollars on the line. Hey man, how are you going to pay for the $1.4 trillion of spend, you promise, proceeds to crash out.

People are reading too much into Sam being feisty. Love that about it in our founders. We laughed about it afterwards. Again, the question is for people that are not invested in Open AI, but invested in all the companies that they're partnered with. Sure. Got to give it to Altman, very forward thinker, itching to go public for the sole purpose of crushing the hypothetical short sellers that don't exist yet. Can't wait for the ass one. I love that. So Sam breaks people's brains just like Elon. There's a thin line between grifter and visionary and creating true believers to harvest their capital requires rhetoric that makes non-believers recoil. Elon hates Sam not just because he stole his company, but he stole his whole playbook. Is Elon Barnumann Bailey the circusman? Or is he Thomas Edison? Edison or Nikola Tesla. Well, he's both.

Not only can he lead engineers to invent the thing and build the thing, but then he can also promote it and he can promote it really, really well. He's both the grifter and the visionary. He's both the real deal and the fake guru. And when you put those together, it's really, really powerful. Sam seems to be doing something similar. In the build out of Tesla, in the build out of SpaceX, there was never a moment where it was like, if Elon goes bust, everything is dead.

Speaking generally, it's a timeline assessment. Elon is more likable than Sam. He has also made tens of thousands of retail investors so much money for believing in him. And so Sam doesn't have the benefit of having like, there's no retail army defending Sam. He says like one of the reasons he would want to IPO is so that he could basically bring, you know, not just venture capitalists, but the entire economy with him. Yes, yes. Yes. So he wants the retail army. Elon says, you stole a nonprofit. Sam Altman says, I help turn the things. thing you left for dead into what should be the largest nonprofit ever. 911, I'd like to report a murder.

And it's Sam, Sam basically giving shit to Tesla not being able to do a refund. And so the follow-up to you stole a nonprofit, and you forgot to mention Act 4 where this issue was fixed, and you received a refund within 24 hours, but that is in your nature. So, again, Elon refunded him. Refund confirmed.

Hard because this is the most dentist-coded car I've ever seen in my life, a white turbo S. Pulling the top down while you're driving, though. That's pretty sick. So, I mean, I really dislike the, I really dislike cabriolets in general. If this is the car that getting a dentist gets you, I think,

no shade to dentist, but this is a great car. If you're buying a sports car to drive to work at your dentist's office, this is a great option. Probably the greatest car in history. That's wrong. but it's not what customers want and it's unfortunate. Speaking of cars, Elon Musk teased on the Joe Rogan experience that the Tesla Roadster will be a flying car.

He danced around it. He didn't say that exactly. Are you still doing the Roadster? Let's go. Yes. Let's do it. Eventually? Eventually.

We're getting close to demonstrating the prototype. It's been seven years. Look at that. Is that a real demo? Is that this product demo will be unforgettable? I love it. Unforgetable. How so?

Whether it's good or bad. Whether it's good or bad. It will be unforgettable. Well, you know, my friend Peter Thiel, you know, once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don't have flying cars. That's amazing. So you're going to be able to fly? Well, I mean, Joe's face. I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.

Okay, pause it right there. What if it just actually is a flying car? It could be. Large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to... Would fix him. Would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached the Earth. How much CAPEX does that cost?

One thing that was super notable, and he was talking about the shareholder vote around his compensation, but also the voting power that'll have. And one of the things that he said was, I don't want to create a robot army if I can be fired by ISS or any of these voting groups. Who should control the robot army? Good question.

Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry in the yields, trusted by millions. They have shared new details on the internal conflicts that led to Sam Altman's initial firing, including a memo, alleging that Altman exhibited a consistent pattern of lying, there's a deposition transcript that is going around, that is now public, from the Ilya

deposition. Tuchan kind of summarizes here. Ilya plotted for over a year with Mira to remove Sam. Dario wanted Greg Brockman fired and himself in charge of all research. That's Dario Amade, I believe, from Anthropic. Mira Muradi told Ilya Switzkiver that Sam, Altman pitted her against Daniela Amade. Ilya wrote a 52-page memo to get Sam fired and a separate doc on Greg. Tyler is going to be playing the attorney Agnalucci, and I will be attorney Molo.

And I'm I'm Ilya? It certainly does matter how much. What do you think the value of your equity at Open AI was at the time Sam Altman was fired? And I'm instructing the witness not to answer as to the money value. Are you going to not answer? I have to obey my attorney. Okay. So you're not going to answer.

I'll do what my attorney tells me to. I think it's very hard for someone who would be described as a saint to make it. We're on the road tomorrow, but we're still doing a show 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you there. I don't think we'll be doing any guess. We'll see. It might be a little bit of a shorter show, but don't worry. A lot of time line.

We'll see you tomorrow. See tomorrow. Goodbye. I love you.