TBPN - 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 had it handy. You just daily drive that. Yeah. It wasn't your car? Yeah, he wore 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. OpenA.'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, on the,

defensive Fiji Simo, OpenAIS 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 like 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. Yeah. When Google launches a new product, you don't have to assume that, hey, it's going to 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, Microsoft. 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 for 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, originally that was like, oh, well, maybe Microsoft will be able to handle and scale the API demand. 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, yeah and so the the the hyperscaler You like your take of think about open AI is 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 Stretcary. 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 was 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 DMind went back to them and it was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, we want those chips. Like, we need the chips.

It's particularly about the ability to Marshall compute at hyper scale. I was interested to look at like the history of side quests among MAG7 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 you. 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? You know, it's a bunch of researchers and then it became like the most critical thing.

Amazon has taken tons of shots at 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. Tried 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 a thousand bucks. 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 W's in the chat. You can get a continuous glucose monitor that is invasives, 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 in 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 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 rename the company, spent tens of billions of dollars on what is starting to feel like,

of a side quest but still is so early you know the meta raybans 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 uh the ramp from here to there on metarabands 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 seven companies but it truly like side quests come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just good for morale. It's just fun. We do side quests 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, really, really change 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, king of side quests. Although, I think, it feels like, 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. Totally. Some of Open AIs 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 actually know like how we're looking on the order magnitude there yeah I think I think a big yeah big part of it super viral yeah and what what percentage of the team yeah 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

It's a nanobanana 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 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 AI 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's 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, and I think 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, et cetera. 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. So Anthropic and Open AI are going to just give the consumer market to Google. And I don't know how, how, I mean, yes, they're like Open AI reportedly planning to shift the strategy. you 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 in to 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 that will distribute its enterprise products across the firm's portfolio companies and beyond the proposed deal is a free money value.

Bain Capital owns Fogo de Chow, 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. Vigisimo 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 demand. 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. in Frontier, which launched last month, to help enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI co-workers 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 forward-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, 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 being 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 rollups? What is the pitch for a mini or a nano model?

Someone ran some e-vails 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 Trey's idea yesterday. Yeah, we're going to run this on 1080 TIs. Yeah, I mean, it's like, like, how small the model is doesn't actually like matter on what hardware. Imagine, imagine running your vintage neoclou. 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 Vera Ruben Rubin like you have to imagine that there will be models that only run

on Rubin and need to be sort of re-architectedited to run on hopper I would imagine sure I mean I think there's like small performance boost that you can get or might just be slower but but you can always you can run any model on like any hardware it's just like it could be like way way slower because you way way slower the memory's on a fleet of a one hundreds when you could just be on like like a smaller rack of rubens uh interesting what did cal she launch uh cal she launched the one billion dollar uh perfect bracket challenge one billion dollars for a perfect march madness bracket so you can win one billion dollars for entering this competition i haven't read the fine print

but it seemed it is positioned that way vini says it would be hilarious if citadel built out a team to attempt to financially impair their competitors. So Sig Parametrics 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. If you have non quintillion, 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, yes, you're getting your odds are in close, we get close. But I think, 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, you're, you're, 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 no i think that they are capping the entire campaign to 10 the first 10 million entries so you have to be on calci and you have my open claw already submitted The SEC prepares proposal to eliminate quarterly reporting if you liked earnings days. 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, etc. And so again, 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. 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've 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. Enouncing Nvidia, DLSS-5 and A-O-powered breakthrough

and visual fidelity for games coming this fall. games are going to get more realistic. Prepare. Over the next couple decades, this is going to be, it's entirely possible this happens. Continue. Let's pull up the video.

It's funny because when I see the video, I want to see it big. When I see the video, my thought was, weren't video games already this realistic, but I haven't played video games besides Tetris on the automatic. They, oh yeah.

So let's play G-Force R-TX, DLSS-5, DLSS, of course stands for deep learning super shading something like that d ls s it uses deep learning it's used a i for a long time the whole pitch for d ls super sampling has has always been go from a 720p render to 4k up res just interpolate the pixels this is different you can see that the it's not just becoming higher resolution it is becoming gen a i like there is a world where you render that at higher Rez, 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 DLSS5 do this. Oh yeah. 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? because Nvidia's 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.

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 notes, AI technology. You know, AI technology has disasters effects on the environment. The majority of gamers did not ask for this. Is that the, 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 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,

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 could potentially make it ultra photo real. But if you're trying to build like something like Minecraft, it'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 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 a cube there and it's black. There's a cube there and it's gray. What do you think?

I was gonna say, Minecraft is a good example of what this can improve, right? Yes. Go to the next post. Oh, yes, yes, yes. This is what Minecraft could look like. This is what Minecraft could look like. There are drawbacks, obviously,

because you're driving the style transfer from the particular images, from the shape. You're not reconstructing the entire image. You're just applying this 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 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 time on 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. He's just like it still comes down to the chip bottleneck 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 going to 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. They've been like mining stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of Dylan Patel, semi-analysis, was featured at Nvidia GTC. The inference king has been crowned. Invidia 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 WWE.

NVIDIA Extreme code 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 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 Zaslov is in the Wall Street Journal. David Zazlov deal could, 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 of cash includes, the sum includes cash and 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 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 times salary, and totally,

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. And it was just going to land with the Ellison's for a pretty predictable price. And Zazlov did his job as CEO to get the best possible price for shareholders.

And it's remarkable. And that is why he was able to have outsized impact. He's getting outsized compensation. He increased the enterprise value through his deal making by tens of billions of dollars, and 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? Rolling flashbang. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.