TBPN - Gavin Baker on Anthropic's S-1, GPU Prices, and SpaceX

Episode Date: October 27, 2026

This is our full interview with Gavin Baker.We discuss his biggest takeaways from Anthropic's S-1, the growing demand for GPUs and why compute prices keep rising, how SpaceX and Anthropic going public could unlock more capital for AI investment, the rise of AI agents, and why he believes Wall Street is underestimating the AI boom.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Codex - http://openAI.com/codexSign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.comFollow 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

Next guest is Gavin Baker from the Trades Management, the managing partner. I have heard of him before. Before the Baconator. We're going to bring him into the TBPN Ultrodome and catch up with him. How you doing, Gavin? Good to see you. I'm awesome, man. Happiness is a choice.

I'm only ever fantastic, awesome, superb, phenomenal. I mean, I completely agree. I love that happiness is a choice, but also it feels like this is a week to be extra happy. Like the Anthropica S-1 went out and it seemed like. seemed like a beat it seemed like if you were worried oh the economics are not working secretly behind the scenes and there's going to be some bombshell in there the haters have been kind of quiet ed zitrin hasn't posted like things are you know it seems like things are on track but what has your interpretation been this week i do think the anthropic s1 was pretty clearly an upside

surprise yeah the fact that they've only burned 10 billion dollars yeah the um profitability the cast generation the unity economics. They're all very encouraging. You know, I put it on X, but I just cannot believe that whatever it is, half of the Fortune 500 is adopted anthropic. And it's 0.1% of their expenses. Yeah. It's just a wild stat. Yeah.

The funny thing is that the, I read that, I read that as the, uh, no, we can still hear you. No, no, yeah, we can hear you. Uh, I read that 50%. No. What? Yeah, yeah. Oh, just as like, like, okay, yeah, that's incredibly impressive for a company in just a few years to get half the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500 on as customers.

But I was kind of like, what are the other half of the S&P 500 doing? I felt like every Fortune 500 would, or S&P 500 would be multi-product using everything. But there's a lot of companies that just haven't really gotten through the adoption hiccups of rolling out AI broadly. Maybe some of them are all in on Google or open AI. But by and large, I think some of them are just still figuring out how AI can be deployed in their organizations. But is that your read on it that we're still sort of early on the diffusion story in Enterprise? Yeah, very early. I mean, if anything, maybe earlier than I thought we were.

Yeah. And it's just astonishing. Whatever the number is, 67 billion annualized, if you annualized, report of third quarter, the, you know, wherever the ARR is right now, but to be, that big with such low penetration into the Fortune 500 is it is pretty extraordinary. Yeah, totally. Yeah. How do you, how have you processed the, like some of the criticism right now of the AI trade is that you have a very small number of companies driving the majority of the spend. I think if you can look historically and say that that same dynamic probably played out with like

social media ads where like a very small number of companies were driving a massive amount of the spend and so you're going to kind of see power laws in a lot of places. My read on it is that you have, like, there are companies based in San Francisco that are just a thousand times more obsessed with AI than the, let's say, like, the long tail of public company employees. And so of course they're going to spend dramatically more. And it's possible that that long tail never actually cares enough, but they sort of fade to relative obscurity.

And you have the disruptors that are. saying, like, yeah, this technology is real. It works. It's not perfect yet. It's not like a drop-in coworker that will immediately you give it a dollar and it'll give you $10 back, but it's very capable. And so if you obsess over it. And so that's been sort of my overall read. Like, I don't think it's necessarily, of course, you'd want a more diversified revenue base if you could, but in general, it feels very natural that all this spend is coming from a very small group of people that like realize that something fundamental has changed and they're trying to take every advantage of it while the rest of the world is asleep.

I might respectfully disagree a little. In that's one. There are only 250 accounts spending more than $10 million. So actually, you know, somebody in the New York Times said that, you know, maybe 10 days ago that 80% of the revenue came from eight customers. I was actually shocked how diversified their customer base actually was. And if you are... Well, the number to me was the something like 11 or 12,000 spending over $100,000.

Like that feels diversified. Oh, yeah. But I'm talking about like the ramp data that's saying like, look, like 1% of companies are spending, you know, 90% of the dollars. Well, I mean, the ramp data is what it is, but we have much more authoritative data now from the Anthropic S1. Yeah. Yeah. And it shows a very diversified spending base for Anthropic. Now, maybe the ramp data is correct for AI overall.

Sure. But the Anthropic has won, like relative to a thought that, you know, meta was spending $10 billion. Yep. And there were these multiple billion-dollar-plus accounts that were driving it all. That just, it's much more diversified customer base for Anthropic. And then for the AI broadly, I do think that something that has happened since June, is you've really seen you know first we saw opening I really accelerated the summer

and has open a accelerated so did open weight models and there's so many companies you know whether it's fireworks whether it's based 10 whether it's to get whether it's modal whether it's cognition that are at scale really open weight first and they're all growing faster than either open AI or anthropic and that was true when open AI was really accelerating in the summer. And it's still true in October when Anthropic has had clearly a pretty big reacceleration. Like I just, I'm pretty skeptical that they would have put the, you know, the, you know, the blank space for the October ARR in the S1. If they didn't know it was going to be pretty good.

Yeah. And I do think it'll be great for the market to get away from these monthly ARR things. Totally. But to me, it's interesting. Yeah. Like seeing the the modals, the baselines, the fireworks, the together's all out, can probably I feel like this is common knowledge. Basically all, they've all been out in market.

And so private markets investors have been getting these sort of updates. And a lot of these companies have been like starting fundraisers growing dramatically from the period where they got their first term sheet to when they're actually like pulling in capital. And so that data is like broadly, like I would say, the east. coast is just not aware of that at all. Some of them are picking it up, but it's not like sort of common knowledge. Whereas on the West, I would say like over here, people are like, yeah, these companies are,

we're already at scale and then they're growing, you know, double digits just during the period of like first term sheet to close or like first close. Oh, well, my firm at Trades led the last fireworks round and it was actually hard to price it because they were growing so fast. Like, I thought we had a handshake. Yeah. You're like, well, we increased revenue. Yesterday's price is not today's price.

Yeah, you're like, please, like, let's just get the deal done. Yeah. I mean, literally, it's like the valuation was going, you know, the multiple was effectively going down, you know, every day. Every day. Yeah, that's crazy. And if anything, it feels like that ecosystem has accelerated and diversified. Yeah.

Because earlier this year, Cursor was a real big driver for all those. inference clouds. Yep. And I mean, I, the X cursor growth, I think, you know, is what's really extraordinary and that's just because, you know, SpaceX has been insourcing the cursor compute. Yes. So on on cursor, SpaceX, like the post-merger integration, it feels like Grockbot has stepped forward in terms of capability.

Is the key to growth there? Like we haven't seen the models from XAI, like stunned on a particular benchmark, but the The cursor team has always been fantastic on product and distribution. In the prior era, GROC was putting up pretty remarkable results on the benchmarks, but then there were all the political considerations and the product was banned in some companies. It feels like Grockbot might be in a particularly different slot because they have that go-to-market motion through cursor with the cursor design team behind it. Is that what's driving growth there?

What are you seeing on the Grockbot's side that's actually showing a acceleration in that product category. I mean, as a user, Grockbot is the most impactful AI product to me and to our, you know, to the, to the firm. Yeah. That we've had yet. Like I, you know, I clude together all this stuff with Claude code and like really, you know, I'm sure it was user error on my part. You know, 50 years old. Yeah.

I'm doing my best. But Grockbot, it just makes it so easy. I think I'm up to like 17 Grockbots. And every day I think of a new one to add. Yeah, you're getting a layer of somebody, the senior manager, senior Grockbot. How are you personally dividing AI agents across your personal life and your professional life? Because a lot of people will have like a family office with a personal assistant who manages, you know, getting gifts for their family members or planning birthday parties.

And then separately, they'll have an executive assistant. who plans their business travel and their calendar for work stuff. And it feels like we might be entering a world where those two merged together and you have one agent that does everything. But we also might wind up in a world where people are using Grockbot at work or clog code at work and then instinct or muse and personal and opening eye has products in both. And they're sort of like an array, but it's a decision for everyone. How have you been grappling with it?

Well, I guess you would say I guess I have executive assistant privilege because my assistant Susan is exceptional. Yeah, exactly. I got going anywhere. I felt the need to, yeah, I've of course downloaded instinct and played around with views. Sure. But and I could see they would be super amazing if I did have someone like Susan in my professional life, but I do.

Yeah. But for the more professional use cases, I mean, Grochbot has just been transformative. for me. Yeah, there is something. Yeah, so much of investing is making sure that the right information gets to the right person at the right time. Yeah. And Grockbot is so good at that.

Yeah. And there's also something so satisfying with the AI agents of like, it can be 10 PM on a Sunday and you can kick off like a real research effort that, yes, you could probably call someone on your team and say, I need you to, like, that would be crossing a professional line all a sudden you'd be like kind of a hassle of a work of a boss and people might not want to work there because they're like yeah it calls me every time he takes a shower he has a shower thought and then i got to work for six hours but instead uh the a i i was like yeah boss i'm right here oh i'd love to look that up for you and spend a million tokens figuring out you know with

a market size of something or other but yeah well my policy is actually anybody at tradies has always welcome to call me um any time on the weekend i try not to call people yeah on the weekends um Yeah. So how, so I think like, you know, rewind. This week is, you know, Anthropic S1 week. And so there's a lot of focus there. Last week it felt like the focus was like the general attention was towards how much supply is coming online next year. How many gigawatts, SpaceX is going to bring online?

And how are you, what's your, what's your, you know, generally you've maintained a sort of bullishness that some other people on the timeline have lost here and there. But how are you processing like how the, how the industry can sort of absorb all of that supply if we hit the higher end of some of the ranges being discussed? And is it just Jevin's paradox, you know, again and again and again? And again, until we finally, everyone says like, you know, everyone likes to say it, but it's hard to fully internalize. I think that's, I think that's right. It's easy to say. It's, it's hard to internalize and believe. And October was kind of been a strange month because the price to rent, essentially any kind of a GPU, has gone up every day.

So the spot market for compute is getting tighter. And it's not just the spark market. You know, it is, I do love reading these primers on X from, you know, commodity and macro investors about these super complicated concepts called backwardation and contango and what they might mean for the forward curve of compute and the future price of compute. You know, these are contango, backwardation. But, you know, Silicon data, which I do think is, you know, my firm is an investor. in them, but I do think they're the most authoritative data source. Carmen Lee, the founder, stood up at GTC and said that the compute market is now in Contanko. The forward, it's not just that the spot market is tight.

If you want to cluster a year from now, you have to pay a lot of money. Yeah. And this is maybe another, you know, discontinuity between public and private markets. but just the number of companies we have in our portfolio who are like, okay, we got a cluster of 4,000 Blackwells, and we got it in May or June of 26th, and we want to bring on another cluster of 4,000 in September of 27. And they are shocked by how much more they have to pay in the future.

And it's not like they're, everybody is unaware of this, everybody's aware of the supply that's coming on. But even with all of that supply coming on, it is hard for the companies in our portfolio to find compute even well into 27. So for all the commodity experts who are focused on backwardation and what that implied, I got news for you, we're not in backwardation anymore. And then I do think as far as how much capacity is going to come online, one thing that I think is actually healthy about what's happened in these financing markets is I hope it concentrates capacity and supply in the competent operators where they can finance it through prepayments. You can kind of finance these GP purchases two ways. By the way, Corweave is great. Corweep runs GP as well.

They bring them out. They are very, very good. they just sadly locked in a vast amount of compute and long-term contracts that are now way, way under market. Interesting. So they sold their GPUs for fixed prices, and that's why they're getting hammered right now. It's not that they don't have compute. They're not bringing it on. They have the semi-analysis, diamond tier.

Everyone knows that the clusters work. They're good. They are reliable. But they just sold for too cheap. and they should have held on or had variable pricing. Yeah, it's not like, is you think Elon studied that and said, like, we're not going to make that same mistake. And that's why they're adopting this more short-term contract. I don't, Elon is a first principles thinker.

I don't think he was probably studying Corweave or Nebius or moving anyone else. Yeah. He was probably reasoning from first principles. But the conclusion he came to is prices are going up. We, if we are willing to sell into the spot market, we can have paybacks. well under a year, get big prepayments. And that's, I think that's a better probably financing model for the market we're in. And what I also like about it, and by the way, Corweave, I think, is very aware of this.

They're trying to get more spot exposure. They're trying to, you know, do less of these big long-term off-take agreements. But standing up a big GPU club, not just bringing on the power, standing up the cluster, it's like running a Formula One team. And a bunch of people who have no real relevant experience, you know, whatever, they acquire some land and some power, and then, you know, they get a zero down payment off-take agreement from someone.

And a lot of that is being cleaned up. And I think, you know, supply is being, being what this is a forcing function to allocate GPUs to people who can actually bring on a cluster, energize the GPUs, run it well. Like, you know, running a formula on team, it's like really hard. You gotta like pack everything up, put it on a plane, go to a new city, unpack it, set it up, set the car up. You need all the people, you know, to like, you know, whatever, change the tires, to change the rear wing if you get in a collision. to do whatever needs to be done during the race,

to do the strategy, to communicate with the driver. It's really, really hard. It's not like some of these people, they don't have the relevant experience. You know, Cori, Crusoe, Nebius, SpaceX, the big hypers, these are companies that can bring on GPUs and energize them and run them. And I do think something that was announced at GTC, in is actually pretty important for this and that's that DSX pod, which is going to make it a lot easier.

You know, it's seven racks, it comes pre-assembled. You know, you just kind of literally plug it in and it works. And right now, when you get the GPUs, you know, maybe if you're if your SpaceX and you're really, really exceptional at execution in the physical world, you can get them energized quickly, but a lot of people, it takes them six months, you know, three months, six months to get them energized, really get them working. And if we can, through this new product from Jensen, get that time down, I think that's also healthy because that effectively takes a lot of working capital out of the market. You know, you have, as these numbers, you're getting bigger. If it takes six months to energize them, you know, that could be hundreds of billions of dollars

of assets that are not generating revenue. So I think that's another, that's a product innovation that's going to help with this. But I think this is, you know, we will see who energizes GPUs in 27. I'm confident that the, you know, the companies I named, I think they're going to, I mean, the future is always uncertain, but these are companies with a proven track record of execution. Yeah. And we'll see about others. So I have a follow up on that.

One is just one click higher from the neoclouds or the neolabs, and there's been this speculation that neoclads might, Neo Labs might sort of pivot into neoclouds. Is that dynamic going to look like they signed a multi-year offtake agreement with a Neo cloud and then they want us to just sell into the spot market? That's what's going to happen? Yes. I mean, what Sarah Fryer said, and Sarah Fryer is an exceptional CFO. She said, you know, everybody made fun of us for signing all these compute commitments

and we could sell them all at a three, four, five X premium. Today. And she was being literal. Yep. And so if you signed a long-term compute contract, really at any point prior to May of 2026, you were way in the money. You're buying compute for maybe $10 or $15 a watt, and you could sell it at a massive premium to that today.

And then the point that Carmen made about the forward curve being contained, you know, contango is actually really important and just like it's not just a spot market it's tight today you have to pay vast amount even with all this capacity coming online you have to pay a truly vast amount to bring on a cluster in mid to late 27 and i think that's something that just maybe public markets are not appreciated even though you know it's not all of this is public you know Sarah Fryer said that. You know, all these inference clouds have kind of given press releases. You hear a bunch of people on X talk about how hard it is to find compute into 27.

Carmen Lee stands up and says, you know, like the market in 27 is crazy strong. So it's all out there, but I think for whatever reason, it's not legible to the public markets. Sure. Talk about your outlook on biology as a. as an area that the labs are investing in. It feels very exciting and that there's, you know, tremendous potential. But I think that overall concern is around timelines.

It's like there's very real costs like coming online, infrastructure costs and opportunities in biology seem like they're very real, but may take, you know, years to get these, you know, will almost certainly take years to get drugs in market and actually drive, you know, revenue that would then. and finance. Yeah, I mean, we'll see how long it takes. You know, Montana has an interesting new program for new drugs, which I think is helpful.

But I think a really big unlock, we have a lot of compounds and people have used AI to figure out that you can use maybe a drug that we've had for 50 or 60 years for a very rare disease that's devastating for like 10,000 kids a year and effectively cure that disease. And a friend of mine did this and it's, you know, it's, it's, it's his story to tell. So I'm not going to tell it. But AI has already saved a lot of lives. And I do think, you know, the AI industry, it's, you know, they're like negative five out of 100 from like a PR perspective.

But we got to be more like pharma, the popular kids. Yeah, exactly. Well, no, they need to start telling these stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, you guys are coming to Tomorrow X. We are. We are November 17th, 18th. We'll be there with you in Austin.

The lineup is unbelievable. The lineup is crazy. Jensen Wong, David Solomon, Mike Rowan, Lisa Sue, Stan Drachan Miller, so many more Lippon. So many people. But the one thing I just want to say is, I get like 25 emails or text today saying, hey, man, can I come to your conference? And the answer is you can just sign up.

Yeah, you can just sign up. Anyone can come. Now, there's going to be a security screen. Sure. Because of some of the people who are coming, and I do, you know, there are unannounced speakers that are, you know, comparable in caliber to some of those you reference. So we're going to have a lot of security at the conference. And everybody's, you'll be screened.

But you can just sign up. You do not need to ask me. You don't need to ask Antonio. You can just come. And it's like the whole goal is to kind of democratize. investing and in addition to those companies you know we are we're going to have Lynn from fireworks chase from Crusoe Scott from Cognition we're gonna have Max from Lagora we're gonna have a lot of companies based two and two and two in from

base 10 yeah we are gonna have a lot of these CEOs there that are gonna be on a stage and then we're gonna have you know dozens of other private CEOs and you know it's an attempt to kind of like open up the aperture of you know information for retail investors and democratize this so like if you're wondering about coming just sign up you don't need to ask me tomorrow at summit.com not Gavin Baker's email you can go to a URL once you're there you can get you can get Gavin to sign and they will email you When you sign up, yes. Yeah.

What do you think will change in the content and the conversation between last year's event and this year's event? What are you hoping to get across? We did. This is the first time. This is the first one. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, yeah. We're excited. We're going to have, you know, we're going to have by-siders doing the fireside chats. We're going to have, you know, management teams are going to have the opportunity. If you were an active contributor on X, substact, you're. Reddit, you get to come for free. And then management teams are going to be able to do a breakout session with all of those X accounts.

So if you're one of the four or five hundred kind of financial commentators that we've given a scholarship to, you're going to get, you know, a lot of management teams are going to opt in and you're going to be able to kind of have your own session with the management team to ask your questions. then you're going to be able to go write what you learned for your audience. And I think we have a really high quality. I picked most of them. And you don't have to be bullish.

You know, I love skeptics. I love bears. You just have to be polite and nice and constructive. And you can be bearish while being polite, nice and constructive. And, you know, we have loads of skeptics. We have loads of optimists. Like, I think it's going to be great. And then I hope every CEO does, you know, kind of a hit on your show after they're on stage or before.

Yeah. I'm pretty excited about it. It might be the longest TVPN episode ever. I think so. See. Yeah. How do you deal with all the attention, positive and negative? Does that mean for me?

Yeah, for you. For you. Oh, man. I just feel like you talked about your mindset right at the beginning of the show. just, you know, it's a choice to be happy. But I feel like when it comes, when the spotlight, you know, once every week shines directly on you.

There's a lot of love, a little bit of hate sprinkled in there. The whole spectrum of human emotions. We can call it what it is. I mean, there are a lot of, there are a lot of tractors, let's say. I would just say, look, Antonio, who I'm doing the conference with, he says being on X is an exercise and cultivated equanimity. I don't take any of it personally. I'm not on X to be right.

I'm right now I would, you know, I'm a responsible optimist, but I'm trying to be open-minded to new negative facts and constantly search them out. But I'm really on X, you know, to learn. And I, you know, all of the hate, like I try to sip through it for, oh, wow, that is actually a very good, compelling, bearish argument. You know, like there was an interesting post. I forget it was like PE analyst or LBO analyst and it just said, hey, you know, the fact that

Anthropic is dedicating 74% of their compute's training, you could read it. And on the one hand, it's bullish because they could be generating a lot more revenue. On the other hand, if all this compute is being dedicated towards training, and for any reason, somebody decides you need less compute for training, that's a lot of supply that could hit the inference market. And hey, wow, that's like a really interesting, you know, bearish perspective. And so, you know, I'm human. I don't like I'm human, but it's also just like, I'm here to learn. I want to get to the right answer. I'm sharing my views. If somebody shares a helpful negative perspective, I try to thank them. I need to go like think that person,

an LBO analyst, I think it was. I didn't have time. But yeah, it's an exercise of cultivated equanimity. You can't, you can't take it personally. But I do, I am trying, you know, doing what little I can, you know, has like Gavin Baker. You know, I don't have millions or tens of millions of followers. But I am trying to help paint, I think, a more. optimistic vision for AI doing what I can to help the American public understand that,

hey, like, you actually want a data center in your town. You know, one of my favorite exchanges was somebody said, well, I'll wait until they start building data centers at the wealthiest county in America. Well, Luded County is the wealthiest county in America. They have the highest per capita data centers. Yep. Virginia, U.S. East. We know it on Amazon.

U.S. availability of them. We love it. Yep. So just understanding that like, I understand why, you know, some people are worried. There's been a lot of fear. There's, you know, we've all seen scary movies. But a lot of awesome things are happening today because of AI for ordinary Americans, for

blue-collar Americans, for these small towns. We're re-industrializing America. We're, you know, massively increasing our electrical generation capacity, which is you cannot re-industrialized without power that's job number one so I think a lot of good things are happening and I'm just trying to do what little I can to at least tell that side of the story and then be pretty balanced like you know anthropic I called it like I saw it in the summer they were losing market share I'm calling it like I see it in October they are re-accelerating

yeah and gaining share yeah the S-1 it was an upside surprise to me I'm trying to call balls and strikes sure because my job is to just get it right. Yeah. Jordan mentioned it. And it's funny because, you know, people will get so flustered by, you know, seeing different posts on X. But imagine how boring X would be if no one ever took a stand. Oh, yeah.

It was just like, well, it might be this. Yeah. And it might be this. No, no, no. It's over or we're back. This is the best thing ever. Because then we can have a debate. At least you took a stand.

Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. You already mentioned getting sharp on bio, starting to think about opportunities there. How deep have you gone in the AI stack? I saw a funny post that was like, you could spend all your time thinking about Open AI and Anthropic and Google and then meet all the neoclods and meet Lynn and Tewin and figure

out what's going on in the private markets. Or you could just buy copper and you can just sit there and hold copper, right? Because like it's almost a perfect proxy or something like that. But how far have you gone down into energy infrastructure? structure, commodities, like how sharp are you on those? How relevant or interesting are those markets to you in this world? Since they do seem adjacent. No, I pay close attention to all of those.

I ran a diversified fund in prior life for nine years. You know, I was an energy investor, you know, natural resources. I always, for many years I did, would do like kind of marketing meetings with the gold analyst at my prior employer Fidelity, so I'd always knew about the merits of gold from a portfolio construction perspective would always have it in the fund. By the way, just because it triggers people,

I want to say it, I find it so amusing how upset gold bowls get at the idea of asteroid mining. Like, the idea of asteroid mining. No one, no one has ever been, I've never

gotten more hate than from the gold. crowd about the idea of asteroid mining and the asteroid supply I mean it was like talk about a challenge to your world's wait are they not about that new alchemy startup you have to like you need to imagine technological disruption right like look at the diamond industry yeah right like yes if you if you understood that the technology disruption was possible you probably built labs like you know 20 years ago maybe you would have done something different with that you know, with the diamonds in your family. But as far as, I mean, I do, we have spent a lot of time on, like, energy, on the

industrial infrastructure, on natural resources. But we have not made it a big part of the portfolio. We've done some things in private markets as far as trying to help with rare earths. But this is not through acquiring mines. It's more, you know, the problem with rare earths, it's not that they're rare. It's that refining them is a very dirty process. So we've, you know, that we've invested in a company that, you know, has a chemical process for refining rare earths. And, you know, I actually think DARPA has done some pretty smart stuff.

Like they kind of have a lot of different efforts around this. But yeah, I mean, I try to pay as close attention to all of it as I can because you, you know, has an investor. You never know where a weak but important signal is. is going to come from. And so want to cast as wide a net as possible, but then also kind of focus maybe a portfolio on the areas where I do feel like maybe we have the biggest competitive advantage has affirmed.

How are you thinking about the evolution of like the marginal capital decider sort of changing in 2027 potentially? Like if you go back a couple of years, you have essentially like seed stage VCs, making bets on these AI labs, and then eventually some more scaled-up venture firms, being important capital partners. Some of them have taken board seats, but they are not deciding the race now.

It's big hedge funds, pre-IPO rounds, but we're coming up to a world where the fidelities of the world, the insurance agencies are going to be involved in the insurance funds and sovereign wealth funds are going to be increasingly involved in financing the build-out. Like, what does the next year look like from a perspective of, like, how we get the big dollars into the AI build out? I mean, I think you named all the big dollar sources. Yeah. And something that I think is pretty underappreciated is, you know, American mutual funds. Okay.

You are limited in the percentage you can hold in a liquid asset. Sure. And so SpaceX and Anthropic going public. Yep. is actually going to free up a huge amount of buying power. Interesting. In private markets. Yep.

Once those are fully unlocked, because they have to be public and unlocked. Interesting. So I think you will see mutual funds, you know, and they've always been involved. You know, my former colleagues, Capital Research, T.R. Price, M-SAM, G-Sam, you know, Franklin Templeton. If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I love you all. But they've been pretty involved. I mean, the sovereigns have been very involved, particularly, you know, particularly the ones in the GCC and particularly the ones in the UAE.

Yeah. Like MGX, Mubodala, all the sovereigns there. I mean, Atreides and Baller, we co-led Crusoe with Mubadala. So I think the UAE in particular has been extremely front-footed. with all their sovereigns with respect to AI. Yeah. And now Apollo is taking a stake in Mubatala, which sort of completes the cycle.

Yes, yeah. But I mean, that's going to have to evolve. But it's also, I do think we're probably getting, has these underpriced. So all these clouds, they signed contracts at well below, what are below market values. And has those contracts reprice higher, has they bring on more compute with more spot

like we discussed with the same thing that CoreWeave is trying to do. I do think you're going to see, like there's a pretty big acceleration in the clouds last quarter. And forget relative to expectations this or that, but I think you're gonna see a pretty continuous acceleration in the sum of the big hyper-scaler

cloud revenue growth, the neoclouds, that number is just going to continue to accelerate. And then, you know, it's dropping down at very high margins so that, you know, operating cash flow is following. And then you're going to be able to, I think, finance probably more than people think of the 2007 filled out out of cash flow. Like, I don't know if we've seen the peak of external financing. But I think we're getting close. Yeah, yeah. And that'll be really helpful. Totally, yeah.

No one can complain about that. That's just, yeah, investing in the future. AI skeptics will be at a bad place. In a horrible place. We're going to have to check on them. You're going to have to go around. Maybe I'm wrong. And, you know, but like I will change my mind when the facts change

and I'm just going to try and keep calling balls and strikes. And then trying to, you know, be an advocate to, to help understand ordinary Americans that this technology can and should be awesome for them. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very interested to see how anthropic and open eye becoming public companies, like impacts like overall sentiment specifically on X

because right now you have such a small number of people that actually hold shares in these companies, right? And so like maybe there's 50,000 people that have some incentive. to be relatively optimistic, you know, or, you know, you should be able to see both the bull case and the bear case for any company. But when that changes and you have millions of people globally that suddenly can have exposure, how does sentiment change, right? And I think people are going to be, I think it will be less, much less extreme once you have the sort of middle of the road investor has some exposure, right? And it's not like totally binary where like very, very small number of people.

people have exposure, like, and it's direct exposure, right? Because if you happen to own shares, there's some retirement fund or through a hyper-scaler or things like that, it's not the same. And maybe some of them will do what Elon did. You know, every child in America is going to have a share of SpaceX. Sure. That's awesome.

I think that's way better for America than setting up some foundation. Yeah. That, you know, a board or a bunch of bureaucrats are going to decide how to allocate the money. Yeah. You know, just give people the money. Yeah. Like I hope like, let people make individual decisions. Yeah. And I would, you know, I would encourage more company and more, you know, more wealthy people in America to do what Elon and Michael Dell and of course, you know, Michael Gersner. Yeah. Have done.

That's awesome for America and great for capitalism. Yeah. And it's it feels so important that that infrastructure got built before the big liquidity wave before SpaceX goes public so that it's there and it's been tested and it's been implemented rolled out so that anyone who wants to participate that can actually go and like take advantage of it without needing to you know say oh it'd be nice if the government had a program that let me give shares directly to the american populace like nope it's there it works it's up to date like it's in the app store you can go download it um yeah just give people the money yeah give everybody stake in capitalism yeah no i completely agree it's great uh well thank you so much we'll see you very soon we'll see you

you. TomorrowXSummit.com. TomorrowX Summit, November 17th, 18, Austin, Texas. We'll see you there. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers, good to see you. Goodbye.