SpaceX Financials, Does AI Increase Unemployment or Leisure, Chimp Civil War | Diet TBPN

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. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  The news on Artemis 2 is exciting. Today is splashdown day. If you've been tracking it, it's been over a full week at this point. It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right, NASA said of reentry and splashdown with the first astronauts from the moon in over 50 years. After an epic trip to the moon and back, it's landing day for the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth from the moon. A fiery 13-minute plunge through Earth's atmosphere at about 24,000 miles an hour will subject them to degrees and temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit with only their heat shield for protection.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  It feels fast. It feels like they just left.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does. So if you're looking to actually track the mission, the Artemis 2 Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10th, at 8:00 PM Eastern, 5:07 Pacific. Splashdown is in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of San Diego, not far from here. Returning home on the ship to end a 10-day trip to the moon are the NASA astronauts, who we followed, and they seem very, very happy. They just woke up for landing day.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  What is the exact splashdown time?

• 1:17John Coogan?

  5:07 PM Pacific.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  We'll be tracking that. In other space news, SpaceX has some financials going out in the information today. SpaceX posted nearly $5 billion loss last year from AI spending, but they generated $18.5 billion in revenue. Two people familiar with the figures said this is from Corey Weinberg in the information. The financial figures include XAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence company that SpaceX acquired in February. The net loss, as well as other financial figures that consolidate SpaceX and XAI's performance, haven't been previously reported, but now they are here.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think everyone was expecting this. SpaceX, very profitable company, bought, acquires a very unprofitable company combined.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  But new opportunity, and all in the pursuit of vertical integration. And so SpaceX has closely guarded its financials as it prepares. For what will likely be the largest IPO of all time. The lost figure shows that investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of high performing commercial space and telecom firm. But that's sort of been the space, been the Tesla model for a long time. Elon has always had multiple irons in the fire. One project that's working and producing cash flow and growing to finance the next piece of innovation. Ashley Vance has an interesting deep dive on the Tesla semi truck factory.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  He went and saw it rolling off the factory line, which was one of those projects that has been rumored for a very long time. Announced a very long time ago, but seems to be getting off the ground. Tesla has spent heavily on chips and data centers to power XAI with capital expenditures for the division nearing 11, nearing 13 billion, so lots of capex. That was 50% more capital spending than the rocket and satellite divisions combined. It is crazy how quickly you can spend a lot of money on a data center versus, you know, you'd think a satellite manufacturing facility or a rocket manufacturing facility would be the most expensive thing, but it is in fact not.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's that other, what's the, the company, the, the Dalian back?

• 3:25John Coogan?

  The, the satellite bus company in.

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm forgetting the name of it, but like wildly profitable.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's, it's been pretty astonishing to see space companies, which you would just assume would, would lose money.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Indefinitely actually figuring out ways. Was it EnduroSat?

• 3:42John Coogan?

  EnduroSat, yeah. EnduroSat. And when we talked to the founder of EnduroSat, it's, it did sound like there was a lot of really important manufacturing, but it wasn't at the level of like buying tools from ASML and, and spending a hundred million dollars on a single machine. I think ASML's lithography machines are up to like 400 million dollars and there's a huge backlog. So the chip, chip expenditures can get really, really high. SpaceX's core business of selling rocket launch services to governments and companies as well as selling its own Starlink Satellite Internet Services together generated nearly eight billions, eight billion in EBIT, in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  And amortization and stock-based compensation in 2025. So 8 billion EBITDA, that is a fantastic number for SpaceX, a very, very solidly profitable business there at the core. The two space-related divisions are intertwined with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon 9 launches carrying Starlink satellites rather than other companies payloads. And I saw another, I saw another piece about how there's still like way more demand than supply just in the launch market broadly. A lot of companies have spun up with big plans to put things into orbit. We talked to a founder yesterday who's doing a new, a new GPS system in low earth orbit. And so there's a lot of demand for launch and Elon and the

• 5:03John Coogan?

  rest of the space industry seemingly can't make rockets fast enough. I'm excited to talk to Jason Kim of Firefly Aerospace about the launch market broadly, going to the moon, and what else Jason has planned in the, in the orbital economy, the lunar economy, the space economy. Overall, including its AI division, the company generated just over 6.5 billion in adjusted EBITDA. SpaceX's depreciation of chips, rockets, and satellites was among the largest expense, topping 6.6 billion. Other large costs were stock-based comp and interest expense, which neared 2 billion. For SpaceX bulls, the company's allure is its dominance in the commercial space market, where it sends by far the most payloads into space, lapping competitors. Although we've seen some good stuff out of Rocket Lab and

• 5:46John Coogan?

  also Blue Origin recently, but there's no question that SpaceX has a dominant hold on the launch market. That could further its ability to catch up in the AI race in the coming years, if it can bring down the cost of launching solar-powered data centers into orbit, as Musk has said he wants to do. SpaceX is hosting investor meetings this month and sending invitations to a two-day IPO pitch, a sales pitch in Southern Texas and Tennessee, where it launches its new rocket and is building data centers, respectively. In February, Musk orchestrated the merger of SpaceX, his crown jewel, and XAI, the AI model company he founded to rival OpenAI. The company combined, the combined company is planning to go public in June, which will be a very, very exciting time for the market and will be

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Covering it, of course, on the show. There's more back and forth about XAI. David Sacks is happy that XAI is the first AI company to challenge Colorado law requiring it to censor truthful answers if they could have a differential impact on protected groups. He wants the First Amendment to apply to AI. And so Sacks has written about this and talked about it on the All In Podcast. In other XAI news, XAI approached Black Forest Labs about licensing its AI image technology in recent months, but the startup declined, Wired has learned from Max Zeff. The company's had a similar deal back in 2024, but Black Forest Labs is now trying to focus on training AI models to power robots and smart glasses. That's very interesting. So it appears that Black Forest Labs was sort of serving as

• 7:13John Coogan?

  like the mid-journey of to the meta-vibes powering that first Grok Imagine mode. But maybe there was a consideration of, well, if you're going to be, if you're going to be working with this company, but also in competition with them because they're training new models, maybe you want to go and carve out a separate niche that's more defensible.

• 7:35Jordi Hays?

  Also, Elon had shared, I think, earlier this week or late last week, that they are training a new version of a mag in Colossus 2.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Black Forest Labs has 70 people and is taking on Silicon Valley's giants. And this is from the HumanX conference in San Francisco. It's in Wired. You can go and read it. Max Zeff has the report. Alex Tabarrok had an interesting debate around the unemployment rate and how things might shape up with AI developments. He writes, "AI, unemployment, and work," trying to square different efficiency gains and how this might impact the economy and the future of work. So he says, "Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate."

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Uh, sounds bad, right? Catastrophe catastrophic even. And I agree, that would be completely unprecedented. We really have never had more than 10% unemployment for any sustained period of time.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Great Depression was something around 30%.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it did get, it did get high, but in the modern era, even, even during COVID, I mean, brief spikes above 10, but in general.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I'm saying like worst it's ever been.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, this would be bad. Uh, so then he says, now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a three day work week. Uh, that sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation, these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours. So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and Wonderland boils down to distribution. It is not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that position is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many

• 9:31John Coogan?

  people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure, uh, the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays. For example, this would naturally have that effect. So you could just have more bank holidays, more government holidays and sort of ramp towards a, a lower, like a shorter work week essentially. Nor is this argument purely theoretical. So he shares some historical facts here. Between 18, uh, between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800 hours. Hours fell, but employment did

• 10:15John Coogan?

  not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement and life expectancy all increased. In fact, in 1870, about 30% of the, of the person's entire life was spent working. People worked, slept and died. Today it's closer to about 10%. That feels very low, but when you think about it, you know, if you're working 40 hours a week and there's, what is it? 160 hours in a month, in a month, in a week? Uh, 24 times seven. Can I do that in my head? Oops.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  What is it?

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Uh, I typed the wrong number. Um, it's 168. Yeah. So, uh, 40 divided by.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Never do mental math while podcasting.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  So, uh, twenty-three, twenty-four percent of just a normal work week is spent working if you're working a forty-hour week. And then, and then, of course, you don't work until you're eighteen, roughly, maybe twenty.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  If you're in college.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Retirement.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  And then retirement. And so that pushes it down to something like ten percent on average, according to this report. What do you think?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  I mean, doesn't this still depend on how many days you have in a week, right? Because like, I have more days in my day, right?

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, because you've manipulated time.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yes. Uh, what time did you wake up today? Four AM? Three AM?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, one AM.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Two AM?

• 11:24Speaker 02

  One to five is my first day.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  And then I go to sleep and then, uh, like, five to ten is my second day.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And then, and so on, you know?

• 11:32John Coogan?

  The real trick is just, is just wa- waking up so early that you're waking up at noon the day before. So if you wake up at noon, Sunday, and start your Monday then, you're just way ahead of everyone. People are waking up at four AM, you're up at noon the day before, you're good to go. And then you need to go to sleep at like...

• 11:50Speaker 02

  They don't want you to know this.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  They don't want you to know this.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  Rick Ross talks about this.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, thus, in the past one hundred years or so, the amount of work in a person's lifetime has fallen by about two-thirds, and the amount of leisure, including retirement, has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There's no reason we cannot do it again. I like this. It's a bit of a white pill. Uh, there's a lot of fear about unemployment, and this is sort of a different path. It might require government intervention. It might require, uh, a new social contract or, uh, new, just new holiday creation from the government, but, uh, it certainly seems possible. There's some reactions to this. Alex is more correct than incorrect, but he glosses over an important caveat. The difference between catastrophe and Wonderland boils down to distribution. It's not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable. If there's one thing

• 12:35John Coogan?

  we've learned over the past decades is that even welfare improving changes such as, uh, increases in international trade and technological progress do result in distributional effects, even often severe ones, like rust belt cities and deaths of despair. It's not all nice Milo Minder Binder, uh, where everyone gets a share, or to put it another way, Schumter's creative destruction still involves destruction. Uh, and so people are going back and forth on this. But, uh, it does set, it does set one, one perspective on a positive outcome.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Fact-checking myself, the most commonly cited peak US unemployment rate during the Great Depression was twenty-four point nine percent.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  Twenty-four point nine.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  I thought it had gotten, got up to the thirties, but...

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Well, uh, there's a fun article in the Wall Street Journal, a very bizarre article about a deadly civil war. That tore apart a group of chimpanzees in Uganda. Not exactly a fun article, but it's gripped everyone and everyone is wondering what is going on here with these monkeys. A chimp group's success may have led to its violent downfall, a new study suggests.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  So. Slow news week.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Very slow.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  Slow news week. When the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a

• 13:41John Coogan?

  This is.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  deadly civil war.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  There.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  Among chimpanzees.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  It's just, it's just a crazy thing. I, I don't think many people knew that this was even possible. But let, let's read through it and try and understand what's going on. A rare and deadly civil war has broken out between two factions of chimps in Africa, according to new research. The dispute erupted in what was once a cohesive group of about 200 chimps, whose ties stretched back two decades. It just took three years for them to turn on each other, according to a new study in the Journal of Science. We've known for a long time that chimpanzees will attack and kill their neighbors, said primatologist John Mottani, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Go Blue.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  A study co, and a study co-author. It turns out they will do this even when those neighbors are former friends and allies.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  So I'm, I'm just reading this from the lens of the technology industry.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Yes. Many, many cases, there is, this is, this is potentially a metaphor. For 20 years, the, the chimps of Uganda's Kabale National Park were living the good life by being together, Mottani said. They helped one another, dominated and killed apes from neighboring groups, expanded their territory and boosted their babies' chances of survival. But in 2015, the group started splitting into two clusters. Several male chimps who had bridged cliques within the larger group died from disease, weakening social ties. Around the same time, a new alpha male rose to dominance. Changes in the dominance hierarchy can fuel more aggression intentions, said Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and study co-author.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  As aggression escalated, the factions drifted into separate areas of the park. By 2018, the split was complete. This is, it's interesting, it took like 10 years to do this full study. But by 2018, the study was complete. The two groups had no remaining social or reproductive ties between them. The last chimp infant with parents from different groups was born in 2015. What was once the center of the group's territory became a border which chimps patrolled, the researchers found. Then the hostilities began in earnest. Members of the smaller group of the two. Groups launched coordinated lethal attacks on the other, aiming to kill rival adult males. By 2021, these raids had expanded to target younger apes, averaging several infant deaths a year ago.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Devastating.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Since, a year since. And there's a video here of the encounter between these two rival groups, and they're fighting it out. So more than 24 apes have died as a result of the conflict. That's horrible. The true death toll is probably higher, given that so many chimps, there are so many chimps in a large area, some deaths go unrecorded. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but, sorry to jump in, but, you know, this group of apes has been being, has been studied for, for, it sounds like, over 10 years now.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, got to intervene.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  At any point, did they think like, hey, let's, let's break it up?

• 16:37John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Is, is that, is the ethical thing to do, to let them continue to fight?

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  At what point do you step in? How many, how many apes, how many chimps need to die before, hey, let's stop the research project?

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, step in?

• 16:52John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's an important, total question.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, we may have an assignment for you this weekend.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  I think you need to hop on a plane. Let's see if there's any more about this. I mean, there is, you know, like, for a lot of these studies, observation, you want to be hands off and not putting your finger on the scale, I guess, but.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  Number one, number one comment, put any 200 humans together and the same thing will happen. And you only need 20 humans if it's an HOA.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  It's a little, it's a little Stanley Milgram prison experiment vibes.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  It's very, I think it's very Girardian, right? Because you have the, the two warring groups. Memetic rivalry, right? They're exactly like each other, and you got to fight it out until the, and you have the scapegoat.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split in subsequent violence among chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1970s, but the findings have long been debated because most of the observations were in an area where humans regularly fed the chimps, altering group makeup, size, and aggression. So, maybe you should be feeding the monkeys to keep them happy, I guess, or the chimpanzees? With these chimps, researchers aren't certain what prompted the split, but said it's possible the apes were victims of their own success. The group grew large. And even though resources were abundant, the chimps may have perceived increased competition for food and mates. The once smaller of the two chimp groups is now the larger one because

• 18:13John Coogan?

  its members have killed so many rivals. They observed more lethal attacks. It's an ongoing conflict, they said, and the conversation is ongoing in the...

• 18:22Speaker 02

  I think, actually, like, this does make sense that it got too big, right? Because you have this idea of, like, Dunbar's number. So you have 150 people.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, 150.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Like, the group of chimpanzees gets above 150, it's at, like, 200.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  And then you have the kind of war start.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  The culling, you think that's...

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Because you can't know everyone, right? Chimps can't know each other.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Would Dunbar number be the same for chimpanzees as humans? I wonder if anyone's ever studied that.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I mean, you assume that there's some, you know, lineage there, that it's like, stays relatively similar.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jane Goodall passed away last year and had an obituary in the Wall Street Journal that was very interesting. I think we touched on it briefly, but we can go through a little bit more of it. Jane Goodall was always, always remember the first time a wild chimpanzee took a banana from her outstretched hand. In that moment, she would often say, "The chimp, a grizzled male she had dubbed David Greybeard, welcomed her into a community of humanity's closest living relatives. It opened a relationship with wildlings that in due course upended scientific misconceptions about chimpanzees and turned her into a global icon of conservation. As an untrained young woman in the summer of 1960, she's first ventured into the forests of what is now Gombe National Park. Equipped with little

• 19:30John Coogan?

  more than a notebook, a pair of binoculars, and almost infinite patience for five months, though, the wary creatures evaded her. If, in fact, no one had ever been able to study them at close hand. By winning Greybeard's trust, she gained entry to the troop of wild chimps that became the focus of her life's work. The chimps had accepted me, and gradually, I was able to penetrate further and further into a magic world that no human had ever explored before." The world of the wild chimpanzees. She died of natural causes in California last year.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Why is no one talking about Ferrari?

• 20:04John Coogan?

  Because the, uh, the good folks over at

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal are in the Wall Street Journal today.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  They are.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Writing about why Ferrari is unlike any other luxury brand, according to the hosts of Acquired.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they say, "The business of Ferrari looks simple: make fast cars and not too many of them. On the surface, this strategy of scarcity and tantalizing exclusivity seems remarkably similar to the classic playbook of other storied luxury brands, as if Ferrari's cars are just Hermes bags and Rolex watches on four wheels. But Ferrari has something that Hermes and Rolex could never cultivate: hordes of screaming fans who worship the brand from the time they can say 'room, room.' Few teenagers hang posters of Birkin bags in their bedroom, but droves of them have the sight of F40s and Testeroses seared into their brains long before they can get behind the wheel. Despite selling a grand total of 330,000 cars..."

• 20:55John Coogan?

  So they have more than 400 million fans worldwide, and no company has a higher ratio of people who know about its products to people who actually own those products. Uh, far from championing the brand, Ferrari's rabid base of super fans only enhances the brand's appeal to clients who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a car they will rarely drive. I like-

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just to put the 330,000 lifetime sales into context, Ford sold 2.2 million vehicles just in the United States last year.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Last year. Wow.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  And that 330,000 number is global over the lifetime.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. When Enzo Ferrari established his, uh, eponymous company in 1947, wow. Uh, creating a luxury brand was the furthest thing from his mind. He was obsessed with building the world's fastest cars to conquer the booming world of auto racing. To do that, he also built a clever business model. Like many of his rivals, he built cars for his own racing team and sold them on the side. Unlike Mercedes and Ford, whose racing garages and consumer car factories might as well have been located on different planets, the same Ferrari employees in the hills of Maranello, Italy, uh, built substantially the same cars, whether they were selling them to customers or racing them at Le Mans. Uh, the model created a beautiful feedback loop. Scuderia Ferrari's success in Grand Prix races stoked greater

• 22:10John Coogan?

  awareness and desire for private client road cars, the profits from those clients. Uh, sales fueled the research and development that turbocharged La Scuderia's performance back on the track. It was a fantastic strategy through the 1950s and 60s, filled with F1 championships and notable clients. But by the time Enzo died in 1988, the business was struggling. After a 50% sale of the company to Fiat in 1969, Ferrari was losing money and furloughing workers due to a misguided strategy of overproduction. Even more unfathomable today is that the cars were just sitting there at the dealerships waiting to be sold. Can you imagine Ferraris that you could drive off the lot? Yeah, that is not the case today. The company's future was very much in doubt

• 22:53John Coogan?

  when it found a savior in Enzo's one-time protege, a blue-eyed Italian aristocrat with a steady hand to pull off a U-turn at Ferrari. 15 years earlier, he was the young Ferrari team manager who had engineered the prancing horse's last run of Formula One dominance. To the trifosi in their unmistakable Ferrari red, he was so popular that he could have run for president of Italy. He left Ferrari in 1977, rising to chief executive of a drinks company and organizing the 1990 World Cup in Italy. He'd traveled the world and mingled with the elite. By the time Fiat Cian Gianni Agnelli brought him back to Maranello as chairman and gave him a specific mandate, rescue Ferrari by any means necessary.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  So the visionary saw immense potential lying in the wreckage of Ferrari's road car business. Instead of positioning the product as a domesticated race car, he realized that this was Ferrari's chance to sell something less tangible but infinitely more valuable, the fulfillment of every fan's childhood dreams. Rather than driving off a lot, clients could fly to Italy and take their cars out for a rip around the test track that Michael Schumacher practiced on the day before. The interiors would be made of leather that rivaled Pradas. Unlike Ferrari's untamed best beasts of old, you could enjoy driving them somewhat regularly without fear of breaking down on the way to the store. The engines could still rocket drivers to 200 miles an hour on a moment's notice, but now they would be signed by the craftspeople who made them.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  By pursuing the counterintuitive strategy, he transformed Ferrari into a new kind of company like Hermes smashed together with Manchester United. Other luxury brands manufacture desire through scarcity. Other sports teams benefit from shared emotional attachments. Ferrari does both. It breeds a mass fandom that somehow makes the company's most exclusive product even more valuable. By 1997, the business had returned to meaningful profitability for the first time in years despite making fewer cars. He slashed production from 4,561 cars when he arrived to just 2,289 two years later. Once he put his strategy in motion, Ferraris were no longer sitting around like Fords. Suddenly, there was a waiting list to buy

• 25:03John Coogan?

  them. In the decades since then, it has become clear that his innovation dug a moat around the company that no competitor has been able to cross. To this day, other racing teams may pass Ferrari on the track and other carmakers may challenge Ferrari on the road, but no business can offer luxury, maniacal freedom, and nearly a century of unbroken sporting heritage, all rolled into a product that's rarely seen but instantly recognizable on any street in the world.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Processing that article, personally, I feel like they're back in the exact same spot that they were before that turnaround where they're making too many cars. They're making cars that people don't want. Even the F80, like the hardcore fans, the people that may not even own a Ferrari but are just like fans of the brand, across the board, like whether you could buy an F80 or you're just like a hardcore fan, like nobody's like that excited about it. I just think it very much feels like they've lost their way. Well, folks, it's been a fun week.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been a great week.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead.

• 26:03John Coogan?

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