This Week in Startups - Tesla vs. Mark Rober, Google’s $32B M&A Bet, & XRP’s SEC Victory | E2100

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Today’s show: Tesla FSD drama, Google’s massive $32B cybersecurity bet, and XRP’s SEC victory. Jason, Lon, and Alex break down the internet firestorm over Mark Rober’s viral Tesla test, why Google’s Wiz acquisition could spark a new M&A wave, and what the SEC dropping its case against XRP means for crypto’s future.Timestamps:(0:00) Episode Teaser(1:27) Show intro(2:01) Jason's skiing trip and Tesla stock banter(3:00) Criticism of Democratic party’s approach(5:44) Discussion of Mark Rober's Tesla and lidar video and autopilot vs FSD(8:00) Mark Rober's response and debate over his relationship with lidar CEO(9:56) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(11:02) Further criticisms and analysis of Rober's video and audience expectations(19:41) Suggestion for Rober to redo the test and video title accuracy(20:07) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(21:38) Accountability and public reaction to Rober's video(25:00) Potential fallout, personal consequences, and stock impact(29:58) AdQuick - For TWiST listeners - AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. Visit https://www.adquick.com/twist(31:18) Personal investments and conflicts of interest(33:25) Wiz acquisition and implications for M&A market(37:28) Calculation of returns and LP impact(40:38) Benefits of M&A for society and antitrust concerns(43:27) Examples of market cornering, price gouging, and cloud computing(49:29) XRP and SEC lawsuit update and implications(56:29) Proposed regulations for crypto projects and Trump coin(1:00:21) The need for clear crypto regulations and potential for new projectsSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpLinks from the show:Mark Rober’s Philip Defranco interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1htfqXyX6MFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(9:56) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(20:07) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(29:58) AdQuick - For TWiST listeners - AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. Visit https://www.adquick.com/twistGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

On Monday, we talked about this video that went viral. There is a YouTuber. He's incredibly popular. He did this video. Since we talked about it, there's like very granular things that have been discovered. Tesla community really poured over this video and found a lot of issues. He's friends with the CEO of this LIDAR company. That's been established.

He's set on social media. He's good friends with them. And he raised money with them for a charitable. We've not established that they're good friends. We've not, that's a, that's a pure rumor. He says they know each other. No, I think in the tweet. Good friends is editorializing.

Are you friends with him or something along? Why are you keep interrupting me when I just try to finish the sentence here? This weekend startups is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is easy online payroll benefits in HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com slash twist. Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes.

From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Twist today. And AdQuick. Easily plan, deploy, and measure out-of-home campaigns as easily as digital ads. Visit adquick.com slash Twitch to learn more. And just for Twist listeners, they're waiving their fee on your first campaign. Hey everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups with me again, Alex Wilhelm and Lon Harris.

He's at Alex on X. He's at L-O-N-S, L-O-N-S, Lons, plural. And we had a little bit of a technical snafu today, but let's just get right to work. Obviously, you can see I am still in the mountains, got that last week of skiing in. And while I was here, the docketh runneth over. Lots going on. I sent in some like banter here for us. What did I send in for banter? I know we had like a little couple of banter items, Alex.

Q us up. Well, we have a clip from the former candidate for vice president. Oh, gosh. Discussing his adornment of Apple's stock application. Here's Mr. Walls. I know some of you know this on the iPhone. They've got that little stock app. I added Tesla to give me a little boost during the day.

225 and dropping. Where was this guy during the campaign? Where was the witty off-the-cuff, non-overly consultified guy? Well, we got our answer on that, which is they, Kamala's campaign told him to stop doing that. Like, they very purposefully defanged him and told him to stop calling everybody weird and stop trying to be goofy and funny and, like, get in line. I mean, the guy made it to governor, correct? Yeah, he's a governor of Minnesota. So there were some group of people who find him appealing.

and put him in office, correct? The voters of Minnesota, yes. Yes. It's very popular there. This is like such a bad take. Like, it's an American car company. It's the one successful one. You could disagree with whatever you want to say about Tesla

or what, you know, they're doing at Doge. You get why people react. Like, I'm not saying you have to agree or that you're like, I understand. But, like, they've made themselves into, like, Tesla wasn't always this. It wasn't always the enemy of the Democratic Party and of liberal. It was a, it was a thing they all liked it first. It, you want to be.

It was an electric car. They cared about the environment. And it's done more to change the fate of global warming than any other car company. Sure. Obviously, it's just such a losing position to go after an American car company like this. when you could have your own platform for like healthcare, homes. They have to define something that isn't anti-Trump that didn't work this last election. I just think it's a terrible like approach to what's going to happen.

Of course I get why. Tesla the enemy first. Elon said he was the enemy of the Democrats and they are now responding in time. No, no, I get it. I just think you have to have a platform. If the Democratic Party, I mean, I understand the dynamic. I play. It's pretty obvious, right? They're dunking. He's cutting jobs at Doge and downsizing the government. They are taking the, you know, they're gloating that the stock is down. He's been very critical of Tim Walts, the person and woke mind virus.

And he's moved himself the center of right-wing American politics. So reacting outraged when a person on the left wing of American politics criticizes him. is like, well, I just don't think it's not a, the most important thing for the Democrats is to actually have something of substance that they can offer to the American people that will get a vote. And being anti-Trump worked in 2020. It did not work in 2024. And it specifically did not work with this guy and Kamala. And it didn't work because people, this is not what people are concerned with. They're not concerned about the stock price of Tesla. They're concerned about their home. And can they own a home? They're concerned about. education. They're concerned about health care. The Democratic Party's lost. This is the first time

we're really hearing from Tim Walls since the election. And this is a losing platform. They got to have somebody out there. I bet his whole speech was not. I agree with you that like Democrats lost this election because of their platform, not because they didn't make the best jokes or whatever. But I, you know, I think that it's obvious that Democrats are going to make jokes like this. Should we talk about this Mark Rober, Tesla ongoing controversy? It's all going to be all Tesla. It's going to be all Tesla, but this was a huge thing, and we did talk about it on Monday. So we already discussed this viral.

We have to follow this up. Yeah, we have to follow this. This viral YouTube video that Mark Rober did where he drove toward various obstacles in both a LIDAR equipped vehicle and Tesla, notably a Tesla on autopilot, not in full self-drive mode. Within hours of the video posted, the LIDAR detects all of the, all of the barriers and obstacles. The Tesla blows right through most of them. Within hours of it being posted, the internet was picking the whole thing apart. Since we talked about it, there's like very granular things that have been discovered. Tesla community really poured over this video and found a lot of issues.

Got it. Yeah, we have to go really slow here because this has now become forensic. So there's two levels of this. You know, we reacted to the video big picture. We didn't zoom in on, was FSD on or was autopilot on, which are two different products inside of a Tesla. If you have a Tesla, you understand this. Autopilot just does adaptive cruise control and stays in the lane. It's not the full self-driving with AI that dynamically reacts to the environment.

And we will get into this distinction becomes a big part of this whole controversy. And the second piece, lawn, that we have to get into is who's funding this? and is there a funding relationship. So there's two angles. So if you look at the description of the original video, LiDAR company Luminar, they produced the LiDAR self-driving system that Rober uses. They provided him with their systems for free.

Now, he's saying this wasn't SpanCon, this wasn't a paid promotion, no money exchanged hands. They just gave him their LiDAR system, and he used it to conduct the experiment. Some people are still saying, well, he's still incentivized. Now, we do have a clip of Robo that we're about to show from the Philip DeFranco show on Monday, where he denies that he has any direct connection.

He says Luminar was a partner in making this video because they loaned him the tech, but money did not exchange hands, and he's not purposefully making sponsored content for Luminar. Let's take a look. Okay. All right. Here's the clip. I really want to clear this. Luminar gave us no money. They had no say in the edit.

They did not approach us. They were just a car technology. I know that used LiDAR. So I reached out to them and say, hey, will you let us borrow some cars? And we told them, look, if your LiDAR fails one of these, it goes in the video. And if Tesla would have passed all of them, by the way, now it would have gone in the video. Like, I'm very agnostic. I really just wanted to see what would happen.

Okay. Now, Alex, there were people talking about a previous financial relationship between Mark and the CEO of this company based upon a nonprofit. And that nonprofit relationship is different than this video one, but he's friends with the CEO of this LIDAR company that's been established. He's set on social media. He's good friends with them. And he raised money with them for a charity. Yeah.

That is not what's not established is that there was any money that exchanged hands for this video. We've not established that they're good friends. We've not, that's a, that's a pure rumor. He says they know each other. They, but no, I think in the tweet. Friends. Good friends is. All right. No, no, hold on. In the tweet, and I directed this to Alex, Alon, so please stop interrupting. Alex, did we establish this in the tweet? Because he just didn't we just show a tweet where it said, my good friend got us over the hump? Help from my buddy is the phrase. Buddy is, you can read that as a colloquialism for closeness or you can read that as an arm's length. I'm not going to take an opinion about the semantics.

I don't know, but there is obviously a pre-existing relationship that people are focused on and money going to a charity. but we don't, it's not necessarily Mark's charity. So that is the, that is what people are debating online, is there some relationship here? Is there something nefarious going on? But let's go to the video and the items in the video. All right, you didn't start your company to run payroll. Did you? Of course not.

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compliant and even better, Gusto is simple, easy-to-use software. So you can focus on what matters, building your startup. So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all Gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try Gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com slash twist. That's g-U-S-T-O-com slash twist. Well, yeah, there are a number of criticisms that are directly about the content of video. A lot of people feel like, even though it was focused purely on the cameras, the Tesla cameras versus the LiDAR, that it was still biased or misleading to not use the full self-driving system, which is AI enabled. It's a different system than just using the cameras with autopilot. So again, he did respond to this. The very first

clip, if we want to show that one, is Robert talking about why he used autopilot instead of full self-driving. I believe this is the right clip. Wish me luck. My understanding with full self-driving is that you have to enter an address for it to work. That's not true. As opposed to just being able to engage it. And this is what Tesla is called autopilot and even Googling it, seeing what they determine as autopilot. And my understanding is that the sensor is not different, whether it's full-stuffs driving or autopilot, knowing if that's a wall or not, that doesn't change. So I think I could, I mean, I'd be happy to rerun the experiment in full self-driving. That's actually not true because I drive this every day. When I use FSD, I, are you friends with him or

something along? Why are you keep interrupting me when I just try to finish his sentence here? I was just going to say we had a tweet from Sawyer Merritt, who's been a big critic of the rover video that actually does clarify both of these points if we want to pull that out. I was just going to say, based on my firsthand experience, using a test, every day. I often put it in full self-driving without the address in. So that reflects what my personal experience. It will go into full self-driving mode. And these are two radically different technologies. So what does Merritt say? So this is what Sawyer Merritt had to say is, but basically what you said. One, full self-driving does not need an address in order to work. So that's just

incorrect information that either Mark Rober had or that he's spreading. And two, FSD and autopilot process the incoming visual data differently. So even though Rober suggests the two results would have been identical because it's the same camera, that's not really accurate. The results might have been different if you were using the full A&I enabled self-drive. So that's probably the beginning and the end of this, I think, in terms of he doesn't even understand the difference between FSD and autopilot. That's like if you're going to construct a test and you don't understand those two things are different, and you don't understand that FSD does any the thing, well, I think he has to just redo the entire test, because that's like going into a lab

test and not knowing the difference between, like, I don't know, sugars and fats or something, and you're doing some test on calories. But anyway, what else in the video is wrong? Or questionable or being debated. So yet others claim that Robert actually goose the results through direct intervention in the test. Like some people are saying the breakaway wall that he drives through appear to have already been broken when he drove through it. So like was he doing multiple takes? Were there different results on multiple takes?

And also a lot of people were saying he turns off autopilot before he actually hits the obstacle to potentially cause the crash. In response to this, he posted some raw footage of the, the test so that you can see. But even in the raw footage, it only raises more questions. About 17 frames before he hits the wall, even in the raw footage that he posted, you can see that autopilot does turn itself off and he can't, he can't really explain that. On the Philip DeFranco show, we also have a clip about this. He does confirm that they did multiple takes in order to get the most cinematic footage and make it look really good. But he's saying he got the same

results every time. So even combining different results into one shot doesn't compromise the integrity of the video. So they did another take to make it look more, more appealing. Again, my take here is that Mark did a funny video and he probably got a car from a company that someone he knows owns. And then it got much bigger because everything involving Tesla is so, I mean, here we are talking about it. If this was about a Jeep, no one would care, you know?

that's interesting. A lot on what your take? I mean, I think like it's sort of reality TV. It's sort of the way YouTube is done. Like, to me, I don't know Mark Rober, but I know a lot of YouTube creators. And the goal is always to make the most clicky thing, the most entertaining thing, the most compelling thing.

That's the relentless focus. You wake up every day, like, how can I get the most people possible to click my video? He is a NASA scientist. I saw your question. That is, he's a former NASA engineer, I think that's what happened here. I think that he was entirely focused on making this very clicky, making it go viral. It worked, but I don't think he was thinking about it as you would normally think of a scientific experiment where the results are meant to be. Okay. Provable evidence of anything. I think it's just a fun video. Got it. So I think I've now figured this out. So the facts are he has a relationship with this person, but the person didn't pay to do this. The person gave him the car. The next. The next thing,

piece of this. And by the way, I've never, I've never heard of this individual before today. He's gone viral before he's a long time YouTube creator. It does a lot of like science-e, STEM kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And because his audience is losing their minds that they don't trust him anymore and that this is ruining his relationship. That's what I'm seeing. That's from his audience, from his fans are very upset about this. So I think what I'm getting from this is he is a scientist. People expect him to construct really good, experiments. His audience is extremely disappointed that this one was not constructed well. And to his own admission, he doesn't even understand the basic fundamental difference between autopilot and

FSD. And he took multiple takes to kind of make it cinematic. Now, if that was Mr. Beast, the expectation is when I watch a Mr. Beast video is that it's not thoughtful, it's entertaining. It's constructed like reality TV. I don't think people look at him based on the reaction I'm seeing from his own fans as a Mr. as Mr. Beast, as much as they look at him as a scientist. And they're disappointed in and in the value proposition of Mark, what's his last name? Rover. Rober. Rober. Mark Rober to people equals NASA scientist. And that would mean you would be based in facts and integrity and the construction of a really good experiment, which did not occur here. Independent of whatever you think of Tesla, you know, I call balls and strikes on this on Monday, which was everybody

already knows that LiDAR can see through fog and does batter in rain. And because there's nothing new in it, that's the other piece to the puzzle here. I'm going to put aside, I don't think there's some like bag of money being handed to him. He's already a successful YouTuber, right? He doesn't need a bag of money to ruin his reputation. So I'll take that off the table, right? That's what people are insinuating. So I'll take that allegation off the table. But what you can say here is poorly constructed, sloppy work, and nothing new, because we all knew this going in. So then you have to wonder in a vacuum, why is he doing this? This is not the right experiment. The right experiment would be to have a human driver, as I said, LIDAR and FSD, and then have that discussion where

see if a human can see the child through the rain, see if a human could see the child through fog or brought that up on Monday. And what he should really do is redo the test over again, as I said it. And then he should not be going for entertainment value. Alex, to your point, these are publicly, these are both publicly traded companies. And he has a deep relationship or a significant relationship or what looks to me like a non-casual relationship with one of the two public companies. So that creates an appearance of impropriety. And then the public companies start flip-flopping all around based on it. So he's a scientist. He used his perch in science to do an experiment. He put this as an experiment. He frames it as an experiment over and over again. That's the problem.

The expectation is he did a thorough experiment and he's a NASA scientist. He should just apologize and say, you know what? I just wasn't tight enough to everybody's standards. Let's do it again. Let's run it back. I think that's the best thing he could do. And he should get rid of the LIDAR from his friend's company or his buddy, who knows if he's exaggerating or not. It felt a bit squirrely the way he says they didn't pay for this video. So he's got to be much more clear about that relationship and just own it. If they're friends and they go have dinner all the time, great, I'm friends with Elon. I have dinner all the time. Like, you know that coming into my discussion here. All right, founders, okay, digital nomads and my remote entrepreneurs, I need you

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So join thousands of founders who trust Northwest. For just $39 plus state fees, you can launch your business fast, hassle-free, and with total privacy. So go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist to start your business today. There was one point that somebody brought up that I thought was a really good one. He titled the video, Can You Fool a Self-Dry? car. And I think that's what upset people because that's not really the test. He didn't use FSD. Exactly. If he had named it, can you fool Tesla autopilot? I don't think there would be

nearly as open criticism because it would be more accurate about what he's actually testing. I think that to me is the biggest thing is that he's pretending this is a test of the overall Tesla system, but it's actually just a test of this one feature. Was he, Alex, in any of this, was he apologetic and did he take any ownership of this being a poorly constructed experiment? I'm trying to recall the, I watched the entire interview he did with DeFranco, and I don't recall there being an apology. There was a lot of comments on just trying to get the data, underscoring the point that this is framed as an experiment.

The thing that I'm kind of surprised by in all this, because I appreciate you guys breaking down your views, but I at no point watching this video thought it was going to be any more rigorous than I would expect from a myth busters rerun. And what I've learned, Jason, from your framing of people thinking that this guy is a bit more serious is that people have higher standards than I thought they did for YouTube clickbaiting experiments. Maybe my standards have been too low. But when I saw this, I thought, oh, this is fun. Yeah. And I took it no more serious than popcorn. Were you aware of his work and were you were aware he was a NASA scientist before this? Um, I do not recall my exact free knowledge because this is

going on for long enough. But no matter what, if it's a YouTube video that I'm having a zipping time watching, probably more entertainment than science. That's my time. I actually think this is a generational thing with YouTube. Those of us who remember the early era of YouTube, when it was very casual and it was very silly, we don't think of YouTube as having rigor at all. But if you are a younger person who's grown up with YouTube, there's such a diversity of content on YouTube now.

There really is a lot of academic, scholarly, scientific, like there is a lot of that kind of content on YouTube now. So I think younger people have a different perspective about a YouTube video and how accurate and how rigorous and how transparent it's going to be. The way he presented it was very academic and scientific, that he had set up a scientific test, and they were doing five tests,

and then they were going to do pass-fail-failant tests. So I don't give him the YouTube pass or the generational pass. If he just said, hey, we made a brick wall to see if we could fake it, that would be one thing. But when you construct it as an experiment and you go step by step through each one, that's where he messed up. He should just apologize and say, what? I screwed up. I presented this as a very rigorous test. We didn't actually do a rigorous

drop, and I fumbled by doing autopilot and the naming of this. Apologies to the Tesla team. I know they put a ton of work into this. Apologies to my audience. I know they expect better of me. Let's run it back. I'm going to do it exactly with FSD. I'll do autopilot too. I'll do a human, and I'll do a different LIDAR system, not from my friend's company, if in fact it's his friend, which it seems to be, but maybe not. Who knows? knows. And he needs to address that piece. But he did, I think, intentionally mislead people. I think he intentionally misled people. And I think that's the problem is people get disappointed and then not taking ownership of it as a fail. But yeah, that's my take on it.

Well, is there any ramifications of this? Is he getting sued? Is there any, like, fallout? I haven't heard any lawsuits. I mean, it definitely, there will be personal fallout for him. I feel like this is the most notable thing he's sort of maybe ever done. And now it's, you know, he's going to have like a little bit of infamy about this for sure, unless he makes another video. And I mean, I think now that he's got everybody watching him, it's actually a huge opportunity. He can make another huge video if he does the test for real. And I'll tell you, like, I'm looking at the press's reaction to this.

Like, the verge is, you know, kind of is super left-leaning. They're part of Vox. I know because the Vorge team was stolen from the Engadgette team at. AOL had to create the verge. So like I'm pretty well aware of like their politics and where they stand on all this. They are like, hmm, like their headline is was more than a little weird. Oh yeah. A lot of, I mean, these questions are undeniable when you see them all put together.

Like I don't think the donating to charity thing is that significant. But obviously there are significant. I mean, his explanation about FSD versus autopilot being completely wrong to Philip DeFranco That's embarrassing. It's pretty damning. I mean, I don't know how you really, you really work your way around that one. I just want to go back to a Monday conversation. I'm going to say, wow, LIDAR's great.

Let's use more of that. Moving on. The video does open with a really interesting like 15 minute where he uses the Lidar camera to map Space Mountain. I don't know if you guys watch the full video. That part's a lot of fun. I like that one. That one seemed like very credible.

That's more like his usual content, actually, like silly, kind of goofy fun things. like using science to have fun. And the LIDAR company that he talks about. Luminar. Luminar. That is also a little bit of a controversial company, huh? Like, it was a giant company, and then it crashed, and it's like, I don't know if it's a penny stock now, Luminar,

but the Luminar shares went bonkers on the video. Correct, yes. Tesla dropped around 5%, and Luminar shot up, which obviously looks bad. That's not proof of anything, but it doesn't look right. That's back to the appearance of impropriety. Oh, my God.

Look at the five-year chart for Luminar. Pull that up on the screen. I think this is like a really interesting subplot here. 27%. Luminar shares soared 27% after the video was posted. Yeah, so this is, you know, I always go back to the appearance of impropriety and trying to be really clear about that.

I have this come up in my life too because, yeah, I got, I don't know, friends in the administration friends in high places sometimes. And the appearance can be like, whoa, I can tell you here. I did not talk to Elon about this. He's busy. I haven't talked to anybody about Tesla or whatever.

Like, I'm looking at this just from first principles and just construct a better test. Maybe also use some of the other autopilots. Like, I know Tesla for clicks, right? But why not use the Mustang or like my GMC or my suburban has lane. and adaptive cruise control. So there's like 20 systems for this. Why go Lumineer, who he's got a relationship with of some level, minor or major, who knows, and Tesla, why not try two different companies to work?

I mean, Tesla for clicks is the answer. That was my point with the Jeep point, is that people are very vociferously pro or con with Tesla, and at that point of Frisian yields attention. And he's on YouTube, which gets paid by the view. do. Yeah. So, you know. Did you,

did you, did you, did you, I put it up, but I'll put it up again. This is the, just so you and I can talk about that. Like,

the five year chart is just for Lumen year, where they all type chart, I think is good enough. This is the five year here. And Jason, whenever I see a company that was trading above

$500 to share historically and is now at seven, I'm presumed that there was a stock split or a reverse split involved here, but the company's values now is under a quarter billion dollars. So it's essentially kind of a large

AI series A market cap. Not much. Crazy. And then this video came out, I think, last week, was it? So in five days since then, it's up 40, 38% in the last five days. So this has had a massive impact on the company. Again, back to appearances of impropriety, being impropriety in people's mind. So bad construction of the test, faked results or manipulated results, not understanding the technology plus the stock bump, looks really bad for him. It's got to do. do a better job, simply solved. Use this energy to make a better test and you'll get 10 times as many views on the next one. That's, I mean, that's the real, like, you could easily flip this into a win by doing the test again the right way, because that's another blockbuster hit video.

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I mean, I probably own Tesla index funds as Alex funds as Alex might. I definitely do. My index funds are full of the S&P 500. I own a little bit through my mutual funds or whatever. Yeah, exactly. who's got a mutual fund or a retirement account has some exposure to Tesla, not Luminar, but who cares? Yeah.

And just so people know, I don't trade specifically in Elon's stocks because of my friendship with him. People will assume things that they shouldn't. So I have exposure just, you know, through other ways. Oh, are you not in SpaceX either? I just assumed you were a little. Nope. I literally, when he started those companies, I probably could have been, but I wasn't an investor

at that time. And then since then, I have other opportunities to invest. So if I buy shares in those type of companies, then people are going to say, oh, conflict of interest. Anytime I talk about it here or on all in, people are just going to, you know, try to put it together. I do own the first model S ever created. I do own the 16th Roadster. So I'm a big investor in buying the cars for sure. But I don't trade.

And I also don't like day trade all that much. I buy and hold, generally speaking. Did you buy all of taxes crypto when he had to divestate? No, but he, as I said, he on the All In Podcasts where he came on, he was, has been an LP in my firm in my venture funds, you know, not major. I think it was a small amount, but he was up like 7, 8, 9x in our first fund because he didn't sell the Robin Hood shares that had been distributed. And so he had to, because I think two of my companies from our first fund pivoted into crypto, people know I'm not a crypto investor. He still sold his GP interest. his LP interest in my first fund to somebody else. So I haven't, you know, and he called me long before his announcement and said, hey, listen, it's not personal. I just have to sell these to another person.

And he lost money on. He sold it at a discount or he will eventually lose money on it. And that person who bought it, who bought it at discount will get that, you know, gain that he gave up. So, all right, next story. I want to talk about Wiz. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the first absolute mega deal of the year, Jason, $32 billion from Big Search. All cash, this deal is absolute gold. And what's really fun is the sheer number of venture capitalists that are about to walk away with an enormous pile of money.

We have talked about the liquidity crisis on this show every seven minutes, Jason, for the last year, give or take. So I want to say that I think this deal is going to save a lot of people some heartburn. So going back in time, Sequoia, Insight Index, Cyber Starts, Sarka Partners, and then later on, Blackstone, G-squared, Thrive, Wellington. They put a lot of money in this company, and they cleaned up. No, they were Whiz, we had talked about previously that there was an acquisition they had walked away from last year, and then there was possibility of them going public. But here we are.

This will be like a major test, I think, for this administration. Will they try and block it, etc.? There are no fans of Google. You've heard Trump say over and over again, he's not a fan of Google because of the woke stuff and the AI products or YouTube, subverting some speech at. times, which, you know, they labeled stuff. And yes, they did on the margins, you know, though they explicitly banned Trump from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. So he had some beef there, but I think they'll let it go through. And I think this will be, this is the starter's pistol

for M&A. If this deal goes through, now anything under $32 billion is going to get done. That's my prediction. So anybody who's got a company under $32 billion is now looking at it saying, like, hey, you let them buy that for $32 billion. We want to sell this asset for $10 billion, $15 billion, or maybe even $50 or $75, because that's not that much more than $32. So the Figma deal, maybe the Figma deal, which obviously got stopped by the UK, but you know, maybe it's time for the Figma deal to go through or they'll IPO. Hey, Jason, if Figma wants to buy what's left of Adobe, I'm not opposed to it.

The other way around, I'll be a little bit sad. But you actually raise a really good point. This is not an idle regulatory moment. The FT, who actually broke the news that the deal is about to land before it did, said that the first deal, a $23 billion transaction last year that didn't consummate, was aborted in part because, quote, directors and investors became worried about antitrust hurdles. Now, this year, two things happened. One, yes, Trump administration, expectations of easier M&A transactions for sure, and Google upped the breakup fee to $3.2 billion. So if this fails, WIS gets funded through IPO. If it goes through, then Google's happy.

And that $3.2 billion breakup fee, is that an investment in the company? Or is it just a fee that they get free and clear? So making a point by analogy, Jason, I think the breakup fee that the thing about God from Adobe was a billion, and I believe it was just straight cash. So my guess here would be that it's just literally money, not a deal. Sometimes it's constructed as an investment. When we sell Weblogs Inc, they wanted us to pause a lot of what we're doing to do this deal. And so we negotiated, I think it was $500,000 in like repayments, like $250, $125, $125 at each milestone that the deal hit.

So if it took, when it hit the 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, or whatever it was constructed, they had to pay it. We hit the first milestone. We sent them an invoice. But what I told them was, hey, the breakup fee will be advertising on the weblogs Inc network. So it won't be for zero. And they were like, okay, fine. And I literally sent them the invoice. And the person in the deal group was like, are you serious?

We're about to close. And I was like, about to? Okay. But it's the 30th day. I made them pay it. And then I think like the president of the company was like, Jay Gail, can we give a seven-day extension on that? It's like literally, this guy's about to make me a millionaire. And I gave them a seven-day extension.

But I knew that if I get a let, I knew that if I let the like mid-level deal guy get that, it would have been a sign of weakness. I'm reading the Reuters article right now. I do not think it is an investment. I think WIS keeps this money free and clear. It's just a, it's just a payment, payable to WIS if the deal falls through. Amazing. I ran the math, though, Jason, just for fun.

You had me do IRA calculations using chat GPT a while back, and now it's become a habit of mine. So a $32 billion all cash deal, very simple. If you go back in time to just the Series E, this was raised at a $12 billion post money evaluation last May. The investors who put money into that round had an IRA of 224%. And if you go all the way back to the series B, that was in March of 21, $1.7 billion post. At a $32 billion exit, 108% IRA over a four-year period. which basically means you doubled your money every year. That's insane.

A 100% return every year. Nice. It's a good deal. It's the power law. We had Sebastian from the book, The Power Law on this program. You can look it up. The Power Law, for every one of these outliers you have as an investor,

you have 99. And this actually probably represents for most investors, one in a thousand. This is like a real extreme case. Whoever did the seed round, those are the people who I want to calculate, you know, they probably got a thousand

return and then their IRR was bonkers. Okay, let's keep moving through the docket. Congratulations to them. And hopefully this is the start of a vibrant M&A market for the United States, which will keep us competitive because all that money goes back to LPs. Those LPs are Harvard, Yale, the Ford Foundation, CalPERS, people's retirement account, and on the margin, some other country sovereign wealth funds, perhaps, and on the margins, high net worth individuals. But the bulk of that money, probably 80% of it are the institutions like the Ford Foundation, like the Rockefeller, this, this, that, the other one, you know, calpers, people's retirement, that money actually goes in large part to noble causes. And you can look up what the Ford Foundation does. You can look up

what Memorial Sloan Kettering does. Like MSK, they're a major LP in a lot of these funds. So that's going to go to cancer research. I know that maybe I sound like corny. It's actually the truth. You can look it up. 80% of the LPs in these funds are noble nonprofits with endowments. You can, maybe you don't like some of them, but it's going to go to good things. And that's why you want to have what we call monetary velocity, right? You want the money to be flowing because when the money flows, you have to pay tax on it.

So if money just sits, it just stagnates. People take loans against it. They don't pay taxes. Here, this will be distributions. When you get these distributions, now the nonprofits don't have to pay. So that's the big secret, because they're a nonprofit, right? Harvard is a nonprofit. But all the other people, the GPs, the employees, the LPs, they're all, the LPs who are not

nonprofits, they're all going to pay taxes on this. That's a great thing for society. So we want to see M&A. It's in everybody's best interest to see a lot of M&A. The only exception being if companies corner a market and then raise prices. Right. I dare you to find me an example of a lot of money. that in modern history. It doesn't happen anymore. Well, there are some examples of that, but I think a

good point here is that- Give me one. Give me one in modern history. I put those conditions on it, because in the age of technology lawn, the idea that you can corner a market is very, very hard. The last time this happened when people had a market cornered would be like the telcos, right? Baby bells, that got broken up. We really haven't seen a market get cornered. You might say, e-commerce, right? Like Amazon, if you look at Amazon as a percentage of commerce in the United States, it is low single digits of overall. If you look at e-commerce, it's like medium double digits. It's not like you would think, oh, Amazon ran away with it. People still order from, you know, Walmart and Target, and they shop in specific vendors and they use Shopify stores. So give me but one.

Anybody in the comments, you know, after we publish this or anybody in the chat rooms while we're recording this live. Tell me the last time M&A caused a market to get cornered. Anyone. Feel free long. I just say it hasn't happened in modern history. That's the crazy thing. And then give me an example of price.

I mean, you can all go into chat chip, and ask. They put on the total spot like this. Like, I don't have a great immediate answer. But I mean, come on.

Company, like, like, what about, yeah, what about all like the supermarkets? Like, there's only like two or three supermarket companies. And like,

they, whatever prices they want. There's definitely price rigging going on in those companies. What about what about beer? Like big Anheiser-Busch and all those companies buy up all the crap breweries. You make up a great point. You make up a great point here, which is, does price gouging occur? Price gouging can occur at times in markets. What we're talking about here is price gouging caused by M&A activity. Now, in the beer market, maybe that's one. When I asked this question to people who are in the industry, right? And you say, hey, who has done price gouging after doing an M&A deal, right? They did M&A in order to raise prices. Nobody can give

me a modern day example. I have two ideas, Jason. Do I want me to throw them out just for discussion? Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. Okay, so I was just thinking about how in geographic terms, broadband access is often controlled by one company and people, therefore, don't have the ability to kind of price up. Now, you can argue that Starlink is changing that. Fair enough. But historically, you know, when I was in San Francisco, I think I had to get a Comcast. I think that was the way it was set up. And so that was kind of crappy, I had to just take the price that was offered to me. Now, I know there's nuance to that. And then I would say in the realm of social media advertising, I think probably Facebook buying Instagram did lead to some consolidation and therefore probably

some price. Perfect. Let's pause on those too. So when you look at advertising, there is a duopoly, Google and Meta. That duopoly for online advertising has gotten most of the gains historically. And that's a perfect example. Meta consolidated Instagram and Google consolidated YouTube and double-click. If you look at those,

they don't have pricing power because they're auctions, basically. So because they're auctions, they actually have not been able to price fix. So that would be their defense to it. So then you have to ask yourself, you know, what percentage do they each have combined of online advertising? They're in the 80% range. And you, you'll probably look it up. But that's a duopoly. So because there's two of them and then a long tail for the other 20% or so,

and my statistics might be a couple of years old here, you have new entrance come in. Amazon, as we've talked about here, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, all becoming places where people do advertising. So let's put a pit in this for now. It's an interesting discussion because what I'd like to do is always deal in facts here and question like our gut reaction to things. And I think this is, you know, Lon, you're instinctual like, aren't they doing this still? I think that the important part is to actually deal in the facts there. It is, have any of the recent mergers that we've had resulted in market dominance, that resulted in price gouging, right? That's what we need to know. And when

did those occur? Because we are living in a belief system that these big companies are merging and then they're raising prices. But technology is deflationary. What typically happens when these things merge is you lower prices and you increase volume. Amazon is such an amazing deal, right? And even in travel, when they consolidated all these travel vendors, the response to that was United and different whole telechains building really great apps and going direct and then Airbnb and VRBO challenging them. The disruptive nature of markets now because of technology makes it very hard to lock in a monopoly. Yes. It abused the power. Abuse the power. The one pin I'd like to put in it in terms of Google Wiz is that in this particular case,

it's hard to make the argument that there are real antitrust concerns because Google's only in third place among the big cloud providers. Like, they're behind Microsoft. They're behind Amazon. So this is helping them to be competitive, not helping them to corner a market. They don't control this market. Right. And you just pointed out, if you look at cloud computing, there are four major players,

actually because Oracle's a major player now. So you have four major players. None of them have over 30 or 40. I think the lead is probably 35% for AWS or 40, somewhere in that range. So proving my point, yet again, we have yet to see a consolidation getting to, and consolidation really takes getting to 80, 90% of a market in order to have the pricing power to distort the market and price gouge. So let's, as a challenge to the audience and to you to, find me the worst example of price

gouging that M&A enabled. Because that's what we're talking about here. It has to be price gouging, enabled by M&A. Can I, I want to make a, I'm not going to make this point. I'm going to quote the current DOJ, because we're talking about the Department of Justice, approving the WIS deal. Here is from the HPE, Juniper sued from January of this year. This is a Trump administration DOJ argument against a corporate combination from the perspective

of competition and prices. And I bring it up because they're not discussing price gouging, but discussing a cessation of competitive discounting. And it's slightly different, but roll with me here. Here's what the government said. Frontline sales executives regularly seek deep discounts to win and retain business. HPE contemplated price reductions for software and harbor products to avoid being undercut. Defendants merger, if consummated, would eliminate head-dead competition that has lowered prices

and would decrease pressure on HB to discount and innovate. So that is the government's take on what these deals can do to be anti-competitive, not taking a position on that. That's the current logic from the administration. I asked chat GPT. Do you want to hear what chat GPT think? I mean, sure. They named a bunch of different pharmaceutical companies, Martin Schrelli's Turring

pharmaceuticals raising the price of Darifrim after a merger. The EpiPen price hike in 2007. Valent pharmaceuticals acquired many smaller drug companies and then raised prices by over 3,000 percent. Botox, ABV required Allergan and a $63 billion merger. Hold on a second, though. Aren't those because they have a patent, not because. So they, because of patents, they don't actually have a competitor.

So that's different. Well, they're buying their competitors. Like Botox, the company that makes Botox bought the company that makes competitor Humera. Oh, okay. And then that's legit. Okay. That would be a legit one. And then they also mentioned AT&T and Time Warner, AT&T acquired Time Warner for $85 billion.

Shortly after the merger, Direct TV and HBO subscription prices increases, as did cable bundle fees. finally they also mention Ticketmaster and Live Nation as our commenters. All right, here we go. Getting spicy today. Getting spicy. All that's valid, but I don't think actually undercuts the point that I think matters most, which is that technology in general is deflationary. We're referring in those cases, most of the things that are predicated on IP, which is a little bit different.

We only have time for one more thing. And I'm going to throw this, I'm going to throw this in a bone here today. I'm going to throw them a bone and say. What are my choices? Let's talk about XRP. Oh, yeah, this is an interesting one. I have been very, you know, I basically said, like, the XRP is such a centralized company. You know, the Howie test is pretty clear on this one.

We can pull up the four parts of the Howey test. You know, if you allow XRP to operate as like something other than a security and they don't have to follow securities law, then while anybody can go and launch a token for their company and why would you actually do anything else? So let's start with explaining to the audience what's happened. All right. So the news here is that after a four-year period, the SEC, according to Ripple Labs, is dropping their suit against the company and some of its executives. This was a bombshell suit when it landed. And Ripple and the XRP team have been very much opposed to it. They've called it lawfare, unfair use of the government power to essentially suppress the crypto market.

Jason, the context here more recently is that we've seen. the SEC drop a number of suits against companies like Coinbase, etc. So this is part and parcel of a cessation of regulatory hostility towards players in the crypto space. The difference between this suit and criticism of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, et cetera, is the point of centralization. The history of XRP ledger or XRPL and Ripple is a little complicated, but essentially Ripple got a whole lot of the tokens that are on the XRP blockchain.

And therefore, Jason, you've argued. that it's centrally controlled and therefore should be considered a security. Now it is not. And my read of this plain text is that now, Katie bar the door, everyone can launch a token, centrally controlled or not. If it's not a security, then why wouldn't you go play? Just because they dropped the case doesn't mean that they didn't break securities law. So I just want to put that out there to begin. They did, you know, donate $5 million to Trump's inauguration campaign. I believe that was the largest single donation was XRP's donation, and then suddenly, here we go, the case is dropped. So that looks terrible. It has the appearance of impropriety that they paid to get this shut down.

But what people have to understand is SEC raised a billion dollars selling XRP. That money went to the company. The company then claims to have all this technology. It is an incorporated company, but they couldn't, what the first part of the case they lost was that the company was not found guilty in the first case, and this is slightly technical, of an exchange trading the XRP. Because what they found was you couldn't tie an exchange, let's say Coinbase, and you, the three of us trading XRP between each other, well, XRP was not selling it to us, right? It was just us selling the between us. So how could they be guilty of anything? So that would be like me starting a company. Hey, this company's called Airbnb.

It's got a billion shares or a dollar each. And I put that out into the world and I make money selling it the first time. And then you all start trading it back and forth. I'm not, I made it the first time when I sold it because it was centralized. And you all then started trading it back and forth because you saw value in it and you implied some value to it. So this is like a, this. The case proves perfectly why crypto is slightly different than securities. The securities that you would own in a company would be in a cap table somewhere, and it would

be recorded, and the transactions would have to be approved. So it would be more centralized. But this was centralized in its sale, and what they found was they did actually sell it. The thing that they were still going, the part that's been dropped is the second piece, which is they were selling to accredited investors. without filing with the SEC. So when you issue shares to a company, you have to tell the SEC.

That's how we keep people from launching companies without any regulations. So they weren't able to prove that consumers bought this stuff, but they did have a case, and that's the piece that got dropped as the second piece. Now, XRP's coming out,

or ripples coming out the company and saying, like, hey, we've been proven correct. Not exactly, but what this does mean is, I guess I could launch tomorrow a billion J coins and say, I'm going to go invest in startups. And this coin is going to be used by startups to trade some value in the world. I take the billion dollars and I don't know what I can do with it. But I tweeted to Sacks today, you know, David Sacks 47 in his official capacity, like,

what are the rules of the road here? Because just because this case is off doesn't mean that it's legal for startups to go do that. And that's the gray area we're in now. It was too cold when Gensler was running this. He wouldn't give people a path to do what I've described. And now they're not giving a path to making it legal so it's maybe too hot. So is everybody going to just launch a crypto offering tomorrow now that this has been dropped? What's amazing, Jason, is that we've done this before. Do you recall the 2017? I see. Oh, boom? I do. That was a wild time period. That was insane. A lot of people lost money. A lot of people

got in trouble with the SEC. So this is now becoming the Wild West. I think they got to get their hands around this. The same thing happened with the Trump coin, which was obviously a griff. And then the SEC responded to that and they made rules around it. Specifically. Specifically saying, like, I don't like the way they're doing this. This is too hot. Again, so it was too cold. They need to get ahead of this is my belief. I'm not in the administration. My friend is the crypto czar. He's not the head of the SEC. There's a new head of the SEC. Why not put these projects into a new class? And this is what I suspect, and I don't have inside

information, that the SEC and SACs will advise in the SEC and other people will execute, which is, how about a sandbox for crypto? And the sandbox is you can be of a certain size. You can sell to certain people. You have to know your customer. You have to have insurance. You have to have a board, you have to have some oversight, and you can sell up to 10 million coins with $10 million in insurance for lawsuits, whatever losses, and you have to have a board, and you have to have accounting. In other words, some version of securities law applied to crypto, but not so much that you can't do creative things, like burn tokens and use them for utility or trade them very quickly, et cetera. I really like the idea of an insurance version, like, make

companies up front, put money aside in case they rugpool people and need to pay off lawsuits. Like, that would go a long way towards making it less appealing to rug pool people. Because right now, it's just like, if you could figure out how to do it, there's no downside. Maybe you have to list on the blockchain who each beneficial owner is. Each of those beneficial owners has to have their name or their company associated with it and the director of that company. because when you buy into, say, like, Trump coin or Millay coin, do you know who those insiders are? I think the Trump coin actually, to their credit, I hate to give too much credit here because I do think it was like a horrible, terrible griff that took advantage of the goodwill of the crypto community and the goodwill of his constituents.

But they did put in it that this has no monetary value that there are insiders. Like literally their terms of service was written to be like, you can't. And even said in there, you can't join a class action suit. Or if you do join a class action suit, you have to let us know within the first 30 days. They really wrote a bulletproof terms of service there, which I'll give them some credit for. Making people walk through that and sign off on each piece in plain English. Like, you know, you ever sign a document for buying a home or buying a car, you have to initial, like, 30 different things? There's a reason why they have you initial those and they write them in plain English.

It's because they know that you could get screwed. Yeah. So what I pulled up here, this is the kind of Poconomics, if you will, from the Trump coin. Now, what this document says is terrifying because it's so centrally controlled. But at least they broke it down for you. So you know how you're getting screwed. It's like if Jason wanted to loan me a hundred bucks and he said sign here, it's 10,000 percent interest per minute. And I signed it. Not a great deal. But at least I was informed of what I was getting into. They can get away with this on Trump coin that you couldn't with other crypto projects. Because other crypto projects, people, are actually reading the terms. They're investing in the coin. In this one, it's Trump fans. They just love Trump and they want to support Trump. They're not really into the coin economics. And so they're probably skipping a lot of the five. Which means like, again, and I hate to give too much credit here. But using the analogy of it's a, it's a, what does Sacks call it? It's like a collective, a collectible. A collectible. It does have a flavor of that to certain. individual. Certain individuals are buying it to support him and as memorabilia. Other ones are

buying it because they want to gamble. Other people are buying it because they're probably confused and think it's kind of like Bitcoin. So there's, I think there's different groups of suckers at this poker table, just like in a regular poker table. You might have pros. You might have criminals colluding. You might have semi-pros and you might have drunk people who don't know how to play. Well, you might have drunk people who do know how to play. And then people who are playing poker for the first time and don't know if a flush or a straight is better. You got a lot of people at the table. They got to clarify this. Just follow my advice, folks. Have a very simple rule set for crypto projects and keep them under a certain size offering. Maybe you can offer 10 million for the

first year, 25 million the next year, 100 million the next year. So it's kind of staged. What that would do is the good actors would be like, yeah, that's great. I don't need to like make some quick hit and run. And I don't mind being incorporated. I don't mind having these rules. And then you put onshore the good actors and you push offshore the bad actors. Then you have a license, you know, like a driver's license, not a license, like a brokerage license, but it's a driver's license or a haircuting license. Well, you can say, hey, this is an offshore account. Are you sure you want to buy something in the BVI or in Venezuela? Like, you think that's a good idea to buy the North Korean-based coin?

Okay. Or do you think you should buy the U.A. space ones that are in this area? It's like a little clippy that pops up. Like, are you sure you want to buy this meme coin? Yes. All right. If you need to clip in that. That's my thought on it.

Of course, Brad Garlinghouse is going out. Chris Lars is the other guy. Brad Garlinghouse is dunking on everybody and saying like, oh, my God, we told you it's lawfare pandering to Trump because Trump experienced lawfare is going to be their claim. We were just like that. No, I think what you did was you skirted securities law. And at the same time, yeah, you, the system wasn't clear. but man, if you can let people sell a billion dollars in a centralized token and there's no

ramifications, this could cost chaos in markets, folks. So here's the thing, though, and I know we got to wrap it. I'll just say this. Crypto folks have been saying less regulation, make U.S. the crypto capital of the world, we're being held back, we're being suppressed. Okay. Here is a playing field so open that even our resident venture capital says, hey, maybe we need a couple of rules here.

So this should be the absolute blanks. slate that should allow for a handbrain explosion of awesome crypto projects that will change my life. I'm ready. Show me. There have been none. I mean, tell me what XR,

who's using XRP? Brad Garlinghouse. This is always, this is always so. On one level, crypto is just like the world's favorite Ponzi scheme of the mo. Like on one, I'm not saying it's only useful for that, but it does a lot of these

coins end up feeling like it's just about who gets who's the last in the musical chairs. Who gets left without a chair? Yeah, the greater fool theory. All right, everybody's been another amazing, tankerous contentious, uh, episode.

Let's see if we, maybe leave a little spice in lawn in the post at it, but, uh, feed it up a little bit, so people can follow it. Yeah, I think it's pretty good to have a little spicy spice in there.

Uh, we'll see you. A little spicy. Yeah. I don't know what that dish is, but yeah, there's some, I think General Soes is like sweet

and then they sometimes put chili peppers in. That's always a good. Someone said on YouTube that I'm now the show's mom. Oh, coming in trying to keeping the simply separate. There we go. All right. He's at Lons, at Alex, at Jason. Go ahead and just tell us your

opinion. And let's on Friday, let's talk on Friday, just see if we can find some specific examples of an M&A transaction resulting in abuse in terms of pricing and consumers being harmed. So M&A leading to consumer harm, like actual

case of that. I want to just go through it in tech, specifically, and media. We know, obviously, that, yeah, sometimes the drug, please do crazy stuff. Okay, we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.