TBPN - Nvidia’s $500B Compute Deal, Paramount Threatens CA Exit, Musk’s “Shortcut” to $1T Payday | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: August 12, 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.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/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

Is that the Nvidia compute deal alarm? Huge deal on the cover of the Financial Times today. Wall Street, big names join NVIDIA to build $500 billion AI financing package, a landmark lending plan. Jensen really lined up the murderer's row of financiers for his new AI financing package. Legendary setup over on CNBC, too. One of the greatest roundtables of all time. Yeah, incredible.

Only Larry Think was remote. They got David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, in studio, John Gray from Blackstone, Jim Zelter from Apollo, Bruce Flat from Brookfield, and of course, Jensen, breaking it all down for everyone. I'm sure the Hollywood starlets were pounded on the glass outside looking for some new arm candy, does you think? 100%. 100%. Because it's very rare to see that many individuals. Capital allocators. Specifically capital allocators put it all on the line every day in the markets.

Some would call them bad boys. Some might, some might. Some have. So I'm sure they were lined up, but it's a great segment. I wanted to play this one clip of them discussing just the profitability, why they see this as an investable asset. There were a couple quotes. The sheer size of the AI infrastructure build out is unprecedented. The president of Apollo said more than $8 trillion of capital is expected to be invested, a staggering sum. We see an enormous opportunity for private capital to finance a portion of this along with public capital. So Wall Street's not taking their foot off the gas. Anyway, let's play this clip from CNBC.

More of your margin of safety of energy. So are these concerns about whether we can meet this demand over-done at this point? Do you think, Jensen, that from where you see things, the demand level and how we're building up around it, that it's going to be okay, and it'll all work out? We're going to be constrained for some time, and pretty much across the board, from chips to memories to packaging to systems, photonics, connectors, land. power, construction workers. Another one. The whole thing, the entire supply chain up and down, behind me upstream, all the way downstream. And this is happening at a time when AI has become useful because it's starting to do productive work

and it's happening all over the world. And AI tokens are profitable, incredibly profitable. When you have something profitable, everybody wants to make more of it. Yes. Great demand, great profitability. The conditions are exactly right for the work that we're doing right now. Jensen, why these companies, and did you go to any partners who said no? No one said no, but this is the sixth premier, world's premier institutional financiers for infrastructure. This is the best of the best. What John said, that right now you'll be less likely to have public capital that comes into this because a lot of these are,

companies that aren't making money yet. Is he right on that, or are there going to be big banks and others that kind of step? I believe within months you're going to realize that these companies are extremely profitable. These are the fastest growing technology companies in history. Your customer, should be. That's right. These are fastest growing technology companies in history, and the tokens they're generating are incredibly profitable. You know, if the wafers that we buy from TSM are incredibly profitable, there's incredible demand for it,

I'm going to want to buy a lot more. By the way, who are we talking about your customers? Which customers will have access to these? AI Labs. AI Labs are the ones. That's the ones that you think are profitable. But this, well, this finance. AI labs, AI startups, you know, as you know, this last six months,

the world put in about $500 billion in AI startups. $500 billion is the largest investing period, probably in recent history. And these companies need compute. And so we now have the vehicle to do that. do so. That's great stuff. 500 billion, huge number. But it feels a lot smaller when he lays out the actual compute calculation. 50 billion per gigawatt.

50 to 60. 50 to 60. So you're looking at 10 billion or 10 gigawatts of powered compute, which is, you know, the labs are at like three combined across a few of them. And we've been on this 3x scaling. So this is really just like next year's compute, basically, I think meta individually has a 10 gigawatt plan or something like that. He's having to talk about profitability and the profitability of incremental tokens.

And I think one of the reasons that a lot of people are just very uncomfortable with this is that the two leading companies in the space are private. And their various numbers leak out from time to time, but you definitely don't get a complete picture. And it's very unusual to have the two companies driving the public markets are actually private. Yes. Well, there is the SpaceX factor here, too, which recently announced that they're going all in on Nvidia. But again, they are turning into a neocloud in many ways and licensing out computers. So there's this world where you might see Wall Street banks. Yeah, but I'm looking at SpaceX more on the,

on the supply side, right? Not driving. No, no, exactly. So it's like a six-layer cake, and you're seeing the finance guys there. Then, Nvidia making the chips, marshaling all this capital, A lot of it's going to go to a Colossus 5 data center and then be rented by a lab. That will be one of the potential outcomes. Yeah. But they're just in the supply chain. Because I don't think the semi-analysis forecast was for like GROC token demand specifically. It was just overall inference and compute demand because they're capable of building data centers very quickly.

Anyway, Jensen also took to X to post a long essay, 12,000 likes. He's like fully on X. now. I haven't seen him. It's almost like he was lurking. You think he was never been the whole time? Well, I don't know if he was studying enough because people are getting mad at him about for using the forbidden phrase. He says, Nvidia compute is not just a chip. It is a complete AI factory platform, including Accelerate Computing, networking, system software, AI

frameworks, and a global developer ecosystem. That doesn't sound that AI to me. I don't know. Somebody will run this through Pangram and we'll get to the bottom of it. Jensen is completing the circle, says Prakash. Bankers don't like GPUs as collateral because the depreciation is unpredictable. It's unpredictable because a new GPU can obsolete an old one. But Jensen knows his own roadmap. So he's offering depreciation insurance to the banks.

The depreciation insurance up to 25% helps the banks get marginal deals over time. Speculation here from Prakash. NVIDIA will also advise the banks on reference designs for data centers that will make them fungible. So you will know this is a one gigawatt data center. But it's in this particular class, this particular configuration. It's Blackwell Data Center that's powered this way. And so if you can put it in this bucket, you can underwrite it a particular way because it becomes more fungible. Having them be fungible means the debt can be repackaged into asset-backed securities,

collateralized loan obligations and collateralized debt obligations, ABS CLOs and CDOs from 2008. I'm sure there will be a lot of folks upset about all of the comparisons to the mortgage, the mortgage-backed security build out in 2008. This allows tranching to get investment-grade ratings on the debt so it can be sold and resold to pension funds and insurance firms. It also allows the banks to trade idiosyncratic project-specific credit risk for sector-wide credit risk. So Jensen is trying to get his customers the same cost of financing as real estate

rather than venture equity. This is going to move the data center game out of the VCs into the big leagues. And so I'm sure people will be speculative. all sorts of different things on what happens. Next, there are some other stories. Paramount is threatening to leave California by October 1st if the state refuses to negotiate a settlement in the legal fight over its Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

We've been covering the story back and forth for a while. But according to Variety, Paramount CEO, David Ellison, wants a quick resolution to the antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 state attorneys general seeking to block the deal. He is now told senior executives that Paramount is prepared to begin the process of moving its operations out of California if Attorney General Rob Bonta doesn't enter settlement talks. Ellison reportedly told his leadership team last week that the Paramount Skydance

Board has already approved the relocation plans. If negotiations with Bonta haven't begun by August 1st, the company would start preparing its exit with Paramount's Los Angeles headquarters potentially moving out of the state as early as October. The threat dramatically raises the stakes in Paramount's fight with Bonta, who has emerged as a leading opponent of the Warner Brothers Discovery acquisition, Banta hasn't publicly detailed what Paramount would need to offer to resolve the case, but he has said that any acceptable remedies would likely need to be structural, such as asset divestagers, rather than behavioral commitments, like maintaining certain levels of production. So it's not going to be enough for Ellis and say, hey, we're still going to do

12 movies a year, 24 movies a year. It needs to be something specific about the actual structure of the company. Paramount is also racing against an expensive clock beginning October 1st. The company will owe Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders a $7 million per day ticking fee until the transaction closes. The state's antitrust trial isn't scheduled to begin until May 2nd of 27, so almost nine months from now, meaning Paramount could rack up roughly $1.2 billion in payments by the time the case is expected to conclude. Ellison is effectively putting pressure on California from the other direction. If the state won't help find a path to closing the merger,

Paramount is prepared to start taking jobs elsewhere. Yeah, so he's trying to force the issue. This gets extremely painful for the Ellison's. If this antitrust thing just drags on, you could imagine it dragging on for a couple years. That puts a pause on all of their integrals. plan, just makes everything a lot harder. I don't think he has, this seems like his one option, right?

It's kind of the nuclear option. It's going to piss off a lot of the industry here in L.A. It is the most symbolic move because, according to Variety, the company's L.A. headquarters would be the first operation to leave. And Ellison already has a five-year plan to move most studio jobs out of California. No destination has been selected, but Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee reportedly under consideration. So it's like if you're moving the L.A. headquarters, the iconic Paramount headquarters, everyone's seen the water tower. That is a huge shot across the bow, as opposed to something that might actually be more economically impactful. Like just, oh, for this production, we were going to make it in L.A., we're going to do it in Atlanta. That might actually move more dollars around, but maintaining that headquarters is so symbolic, right? So Ellison and much of Paramount senior leadership currently work from the historic Paramount Picture Studio lot in Hollywood, but maybe it will be moving to Georgia, Texas, or Tennessee.

I wonder where they will go. Anyway, speaking of publicly traded companies, Elon Musk may have found a shortcut to unlocking a trillion dollar payday. He needed a win. You asked for it. He's delivering. Yeah. The idea is having SpaceX by Tesla. This has been rumored for a long time.

lots of speculation on when these two companies will merge, if they will merge. But the Wall Street Journal on the front page outlines a very odd scenario where Elon could wind up making an incremental $1 trillion. It's really complicated, and it's not as simple as just, oh, he'll just buy the companies and then he just gets another trillion dollars. It's more complicated, but there is a potential outcome, but there's some mitigating factors. but it's worth understanding the mechanics of the deal or the mechanics of potential deal as it might play out over the next few years. Because this is something that couldn't happen right now, but in the future it is possible.

So the Wall Street Journal reports that there's an obscure provision in Musk's 2025 Tesla pay agreement that's already been approved by the shareholders. And it was that crazy one we talked about where it was like a million robotaxies by this time. And like the optimist needs to be shipping. And it was a lot of really bold claims. But if he hits all those and the stock goes to like 10 trillion, then he gets a huge unlock of new stock. And it was all like, okay, well, like, it's a lot of money, but that's a lot of progress for this company. Because there's a lot of projects at Tesla that just are sort of slow and steady, not really advancing that quickly. And so he was sort of throwing down the gauntlet saying, okay, give me another couple years.

and I'm going to deliver in a really big way. And if I do, I want to be compensated for that. And the shareholders approved. But the obscure provision, there's an obscure provision in the already approved Tesla pay agreement that could eliminate half of those performance requirements attached to the stock award if Tesla is acquired. So change of control affects those pay packages. What are you laughing about? Mark in the chat says, talk about Zuckerberg again.

I like Feisty Geordy. Feisty Jordy is based A.S. Yeah, I guess I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday. I had some strong opinions. We'll see. Somebody had to say it. Hey, hey, he fired back. He called out Alex Heath.

He said something big is coming. He was vague posting directly to Alex Heath. And again, I just felt like that was so memetic with all the people that are actually at the frontier. And it's just the whole thing. I'm like, yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of... What was the actual... See, see, Mark, now you got me started. Now you snapped him. Now I snapped. Over the weekend, Zuck called me a via his meta-glasses while fishing to discuss the 6,000-word Pro-AI manifesto he published this morning.

Yeah, so he's trying to balance... I love that aesthetically. That's fantastic. Good old American... Fishing. American... American Mark. He told me the immediate reason he decided to publish his philosophy.

philosophy now is that he believes meta is very close to having substantially stronger models. Probably true. He wants people to understand his values before those models arrive. We know your values.

We know your values which are... Connecting the world. It's fine. Instagram's fine. No, I mean, whatever the stated values versus the lived values. Sure. The lived values are if there is a hot product.

Helps small businesses grow. What about that value? Come on. Instagram has birthed so many companies. We know so many people that their companies would not exist if not for meta platforms. How about great hours of enjoyable content? Yes. For everyday Americans to watch every day. Would we be even remotely familiar with Professor Sendy

and the creation of the Wamba without Mark Zuckerberg? You would have never seen that he turned it down. turned it down. You would have never seen that he turned it down. Or the debita. Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have, you would not be aware of that. All these iconic moments. You also wouldn't know that once you go to Ibiza, you must go back to Ibiza. And you would not know that there's a 21 year old bodybuilder who looks like he's 35, who's on his way. See, it's enjoyable. Admit it. I, I don't have a problem with Mark. Yeah. And I don't have a problem with meta. Yeah. I do get enjoyment out of them.

Yeah. I have built companies that are dependent on meta-platform. I've invested in many companies that exist in their current form entirely because of meta-platforms. There you go. But I know what Mark's values are. What are those? Mark cares about... Delighting customers.

Profitable advertising. These are good values. I don't... I wish he cared more about advertising. That's true. Yeah. I wish you cared more about advertising. That would be good.

But, you know, you just look at the historical behavior. It's like buy or copy or chase the hot thing. Yeah, but that's just a game. Like, you know, you're talking about a $10 billion startup that's, you know, coming after you with some new form factor. I don't know. You copy it. I think you're discounting how good MSL is.

Everyone is saying that MSL is like clearly in third place, right? That means that they're ahead of XAI and DeepMind. It's crazy. If they actually get the next version of Sparkout before Gemini 4 and it's better and then Gemini 4 launches and stays in fourth place, like that is a crazy, crazy reversal. They're executing well coming from incredibly far behind. They are approaching the frontier. I just think that if he wants to be the Pick Me Lab leader. You don't like the comms?

I don't. Yeah, I just think it's not. But I just don't think it's very authentic. Okay. I think it's the opposite. I think it is authentic. I think it is. He is thinking about this stuff.

He might not be the... It is just a little bit of a tough voice because there's so much attention from the social reckoning and the social network and stuff. And then like, in terms of the overall AI industry, attaching him, it's like attaching attaching Demis to the AI industry. was definitely better for the voices of the AI industry because Demis would stay on message and just talk purely about science.

He won the Nobel Prize. And so if I was like, okay, I'm dealing with an AI skeptic who is paranoid about water use and surveillance, like, who can I put them in the room with? I'm like, yeah, go sit down with Demis, sir Demis, he's going to put on a good show and like walk you through this

and give you a really optimistic vision. And he's not going to have the baggage of anything else, any lawsuits or anything else, right? And so, yeah, it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a tough, tough go. Anyway, back to Elon Musk. I just, I just think like, again. Let's get back to less controversial tech leaders. Let's talk about Elon Musk and how he's going to make his next trillion.

Because this is what's in the Wall Street Journal today. I wish, I'll just, I'll just, I'll just end it here. I wish that Zuck came out with like a five-point plan to get his own trillion. dollar pay package, which was just like sell like trillions of dollars worth of ads. And I would, I would just be praising that all day. That would be sick. I would be praising that all day versus being like, oh, we're doing open source. And now we're not doing open source.

And now we're open, we're open sourcing again because I'll get some brownie points. Yeah. But also we're going to. It doesn't feel like. They'll have closed models. Yeah. I mean, you go to the Dario thing. And it's like the guy's been hard on China.

He's been anti-open source since day. He's been extremely consistent. You love him, you hate him, but like there's consistency there. And that is just reliable and in many ways admirable. I understand what you're saying. Anyway, back to Elon Musk. He's been extremely consistent. He's getting that trillion dollar in Tesla one way or another.

And there are multiple ways. He's tasted being a trillionaire before. He wants to run it back. He's got to run it up. He's got to double it. They say your first trillion is the hardest. And this is how he gets his second trillion. So this is how he's going to do it.

So in Musk's 20, Tesla pay agreement. If he hit certain milestones, he can eliminate a lot of those performance requirements that were previously attached to a stock award if the company's acquired. And so change of control at this scale, normally you would think that's impossible. You cannot take Tesla private. He tried it. It was too big of a company.

And then also once your-funding was secured. Funding was secured. But there was a trillion-dollar, once you're a trillion-dollar company, like, You can't just get acquired, except we're in this very unique case where SpaceX is also a trillion-dollar company. So Tesla shareholders approved the compensation plan in November, last November. Under its normal terms, Musk can earn as many as 423 million Tesla shares across 12 tranches, but each tranche requires Tesla to hit both a market cap and an operational milestone. So the goals are deliberately enormous.

Tesla would eventually need to reach an $8.5 trillion market cap while accomplishing targets, including delivering 20 million vehicles. Remember, I think the number of vehicle deliveries is actually declining this year. It was a very, very bold plan. They need 10 million active FSD subscriptions. That actually seems easy. FSD is really good. They need to deliver one million Optimus robots.

That seems crazy because Optimus is still so early as a project. We should try to interview someone with a Tesla that doesn't get the, FSD. They turn it down. They turn it down. That's crazy. And I want to understand why. I understand it if you just bought an older Tesla, you like the ease of charging

and you haven't upgraded to the newer hardware package. Because the FSD is available on the older hardware three technology. But I think it's best on the hardware four, which is like 2024 onward. Not everyone can upgrade. If it's a financial decision, I understand it. But the last one was they need to get a million robots. taxis into commercial operation, that also seems pretty doable. I saw a robotaxy driving around L.A. recently in gold. And, like, just from using FSD, it seems like it's ready. Like,

there's probably some legal stuff. But in general, I think they could roll out the robo taxis, like, very quickly. They can make a million cars pretty quickly, and they have the technology. So it's just about putting those on the road. Yeah, I haven't spent a ton of time in Teslas, but the times recently where human drivers had to take over was getting into a driveway. It's effectively like private property. Yeah. So a robo taxi you can just pull over the side of the street and say like you're walking the last 100 feet by the-up.

Yep. Totally. And so yeah, I mean, that one doesn't seem that that difficult. Although obviously it is a lot. I mean, I think that's like a hundred times as many Waymoes. I think there's like 10,000 Waymos out there. So it would be a big move. But over a couple of years, Is that possible?

Yeah. So vehicle deliveries were falling in 2024 and 2025, but seemed to be rebounding. But they're not far off from like a million vehicles, right? 838 in each one. 838,000. Yeah. And so over a year or two, they could probably manufacture a million robo-taxies. And I think the technology is pretty much there.

When you actually look online and you see the reviews of people talking about Tesla Ubers, they're like, I wish there was a Tesla product or an Uber product where I could demand that if it's a Tesla, they have to stay in full self-driving mode because many Uber riders regard the full self-driving experience as smoother and less likely to cause indigestion and sickness in the back seat versus watching a driver who has a Tesla who isn't that experienced and doesn't understand how to use the regenerative braking properly. and so it's much more jerky when a human's driving it, because FSD is actually superhuman relative to a newbie Uber driver with a Tesla.

So I think the technology is very, very close. They've got to manufacture it, obviously legal stuff, but they'll get there. But there's a major exception buried in the agreement. If Tesla undergoes a change of control, essentially, if Tesla is acquired, the operational requirements disappear. You no longer have to hit a million robotaxis or a million optimists to unlock those new tranches of stock for Elon. If there's a change of control, it's purely based on the market cap. And so instead, Tesla will determine how many of Musk's 12 tranches have been earned

solely by looking at the company's value at the time of the transaction. So the milestones don't matter anymore. Only the market cap matters. And so that could become extremely important if the widely speculated buyer turns out to be another Musk-controlled company, SpaceX. So if SpaceX comes in gives a really high price for Tesla, Musk can unlock more of those tranches and get more equity in Tesla, which then rolls into the combined entity, of course. So under this agreement, Tesla's value in an acquisition would be calculated using whichever is higher, its market capitalization immediately before the deal, or the value implied by the price being paid to Tesla's shareholders. If that figure reached $8.5 trillion, all 12 tranches could qualify,

putting Musk in line for the full 423 million share award without Tesla ever having to accomplish many of the pay packages operational milestones. So there's an obvious catch, which is how are you going to acquire Tesla for $8.5 trillion when SpaceX is not a $10 trillion company or $50 trillion company? It's a hard pitch to do a merger at that scale. But this is more of like what might happen in a number of years. Well, yeah, and there's also the tradeoff between he has more ownership of SpaceX, which would mean that he would benefit from acquiring Tesla at a lower valuation. Yep. But then depending on these milestones, you know, he's probably his bankers probably have some very elaborate spread sheets, you know,

six different monitors looking at all the different potential scenarios. So basically, there's sort of a U shape to the incentive. If Tesla's a really low price, Elon probably benefits from acquiring it. And if Tesla's a really high price, he benefits from, he actually increases overall ownership from buying it. But there's sort of like a messy middle where it gets a little bit rougher. So $8.5 trillion would be more than six times Tesla's recent market cap. And Tesla shareholders would still have to approve a SpaceX acquisition. The journal estimates that Musk's maximum award is currently worth about $824 billion,

despite the package's familiar $1 trillion label. Still, the provision creates an unusual path around some of the hardest arguments, hardest requirements in Musk's compensation package. Instead of spending the next decade hitting a dozen separate operating goals, a sufficiently expensive acquisition of Tesla could effectively declare those goals accomplished. New bumper sticker idea. I bought this to help Elon achieve his $1 trillion pay package. Yes.

Full send on the pro-Elon Tesla. get a lot of thumbs up. A lot of positive honks. For sure. For sure. There could be another major benefit for Musk. A combination with SpaceX could increase his effective control over Tesla, something Musk has repeatedly sought

while consolidating even more of his business empire under a single roof. Well, it's a fascinating story. Any other stories you want to cover? Bending spoons, apparently on a tear, 265x price to earnings ratio, buying old boring sass with slow growth. People are excited about that, I guess. Benning Spoons added $11 billion in market cap after announcing the Airtable acquisition.

Can't make it up. Is that true? Wow, $33, $34 billion company way up since IPO. Wow, really, really impressive. Up 50% since they IPOed. They're on a tear. Who will be the next Ben Spoon? That is the question everyone's asking.

Do not get it. Don't get your spoon back. Get your spoon, Ben. Do we need to pay? Unless that's the best possible outcome. Yeah, maybe. We'll leave this show with a post from June Chu, who was the CEO at Zillow until very recently. He posted on LinkedIn.

I have stepped down for my role as CEO of Zillow. That's all I have to say about that. Mic drop moment. There we go. And, yeah, I'm curious. I'm sure we'll find out in due time what he really wants. to say about that. Yeah, it feels like teeing up a tell-all.

It feels like he maybe can't say anything. For sure. Anyway, there's a bunch of other good stories. Last but not least, Leonardo DiCaprio urged Chilean authorities to protect a critically endangered frog from a proposed power transmission project. This feels like something that's solvable. I think we can protect the frogs and do the power transmission project. Yeah.

Do you agree, John? I know nothing about this situation, but I have a little faith. Spiny chest frog. There's a thousand of them that remain in the wild. I think Leo should let them move in. Bring them to America, put them in a zoo or something. I think they want to live there. I think you've got to do a lot of work.

It's got to be rough being the, being the Chilean government and just being like, who's taking shots of us? Just comes over the top. He sent 60 million Instagram followers. followers are away and there's in our comments. Sick them on us. It's got to be brutal. It's summer.

Yeah, it's summer. Go touch some grass for us. And we'll see you tomorrow. Letting the Pacific. Goodbye. I love you.