SpaceX’s Lunar Mass Driver, OpenAI Hires Meta’s Top Ad Exec, Zuck Builds CEO Agent | 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. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Over the weekend, you watched this live, right? Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, the CEO of SpaceX, got some folks together, gave a big keynote presentation about his vision for the future.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  Basically, something that looked like an ultra dome.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  It did look like an ultra dome. And so you watched this, right?

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  I did watch it.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  I watched a little bit of it. And overall.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  And if you were taking a shot every time Elon said epic, you were not in any state to drive after about three minutes.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's got so much going on at this point. I mean, he's doing sports cars, cyber trucks, Model 3, Model Y, just consumer cars.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Model Y XL.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Space internet, space data centers, space launch capacity, point to point. He's going to take us from one on a rocket from New York to Tokyo in an hour, 30 minutes. Neuralink, brain chips, tunnels. These Elon projects have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Of course, he owns X and Twitter. XAI, training foundation models, trying to make a consumer app where you chat with it as well as solve math and physics.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  This was super rough.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  It was, I listened to it and it was a rough delivery. Like, he seemed like, he seemed a little like, just like, whoa, okay, I got another thing to present. And so the cadence wasn't quite there and he wasn't able to get the crowd going. There was a lot of like, waiting a little bit for the audience to like, realize that that was an applause line or something.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Key disclaimer, never bet against Elon.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm not dumb enough to bet against Elon.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm not dumb enough to try to short any of his companies. By now, you should have learned not to doubt

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  what his organizations can do.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  And even though this TeraFab concept, you know, there's a lot of reasons that you would want to bet against it.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that many people that are genuinely sold on the space data centers in the near term. It's not. Clogging for me, John?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  I'm a dad, I'm a husband. You're not getting it. It's not clogging to you. It's not clogging to you that I'm standing on business, is it?

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  It's not clogging for me?

• 2:11John Coogan?

  That he's standing on business?

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  It's not clogging.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  He's standing on business and it's not clogging for you.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  It's not clogging to me that he's standing

• 2:17John Coogan?

  He's standing on business.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  On space data centers. Seemingly the first time he's put the Tesla XAI SpaceX logos together.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Sure. Uh, no. The Tunnel Project, Hyperloop, was a blog post that he wrote and it appeared both on the Tesla blog and the SpaceX blog at the same time. And everyone was like, who's going to be involved in this? And it turned out it was like a couple of people from both sides. It became its own company at some point.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying it's the first time.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  No, no, but it does feel like Elon megacorp.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  He's gearing up for the Elon megacorp. And yeah, so, so just overall, the pitch is, he's basically saying like, okay, we're going to do TerraFab. It's this really hard project and the evidence for why you should believe that it's going to work well. He's like, we've done a lot of hard things in the past.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  Talks a little bit about space data centers. And then he talks about needing something in the order of a thousand times more compute than

• 3:15John Coogan?

  He says, "To reach a petawatt, we'll build an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon with robots like Optimus and humans."

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but before the mass driver.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  He's talking about how

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Oh, we're chip constrained, which is true.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  Elon, chip, chip constrained by 1,000x.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  And so we have to do this.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have to build more fab capacity.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  But he doesn't, he doesn't lay out like a super compelling case of what all the chips will be used for, right? Is it, are they going to be, is SpaceX going to be a NeoCloud? Is it just for their own internal products like, you know, self-driving, humanoids? Again, again, my criticism is not of any individual company as much as the presentation I just came away. He, he kept saying like, if we can do this, it's going to be epic.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and

• 4:01John Coogan?

  It wasn't a focus A, followed B, C, E.

• 4:04Jordi Hays?

  There wasn't a strong justification other than it's going to be epic.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  And then he just closes out with this render of the mass driver, which is, again, it's tight.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  But I didn't, I didn't, what was the takeaway on like, what we're even going to use the mass driver for? Other than to get to a Carteshev? Three civilization, which again, all this stuff just feels so, so, so.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  So far in the future.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  Far out. He did drop the line, turning science fiction into science.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Science fact?

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Science fact.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  No way.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Which is, I think.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  It's a Josh Wolfe line.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny because Josh Wolfe was like the hardest critic of Elon.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's right.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  Like, he basically had to stop at some point.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, he kept saying these lines that he was like expecting, like, kind of laughter.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was really hard. I mean, doing like, like, the actual delivery of a speech on stage. I mean, Jensen just went through this with a keynote at GTC where he didn't have a teleprompter. And he was able to deliver moments and get the crowd going. And the crowd size at GTC is really big. And so even if you just have a couple hardcore fans that really get you and have listened to every Jensen keynote.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  You'll get it.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  They know. Yeah, they start clapping and then everyone starts clapping because it's infectious. And then pretty soon everyone's clapping. This is how it works.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  So, yeah, yeah. I mean, the comedic timing, the delivery timing of like, when to clap, when to be, whoa. That was a little tough. I don't know, I actually know who was in the audience. It might have just been employees. It has a certain aesthetic to it. Interestingly about the tariff fab, this is something I was advocating for back in 2022. So when the Biden Chips Act happened, there was this question about like, what's going to happen with Intel? Intel should be at the like, the center of the Chips Act because the whole pitch for the Chips Act was that America is not on the leading edge of semiconductor fabrication. And so we need to sort of pull our weight with our intellectual property laws to stop Taiwan from exporting them. Remember, Taiwan is its own country. They should, in theory, be able to sell their products anywhere.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  What say do we have over, you know, if Japan wants to sell PlayStations to China or anywhere? Why do we have authority over them? Well, it comes down to the intellectual property. There's a lot of patents that have been licensed to ASML, to TSMC. And so we do have the ability to pull levers and strings to sort of limit those, especially if they're packaged by Nvidia, an American company. We have export rules, but it's, it's a stretch. But the whole thesis was, America's going to lose to China unless we do this. And so Intel was a very logical one. And I remember there was like 60 billion or something up for grabs around the Chips Act. At the same time, Elon was marshaling around 60 billion for to buy out Twitter,

• 6:48John Coogan?

  something like that, 40 something billion. And then Intel's market cap, what their 220 billion dollar company now, I think that they were lower back in 2022.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  I think it makes total sense for Elon to make chips.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it will make sense over time for XAI to start offering cloud services to other companies.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, having computers valuable.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  But, but still, it, this seems like a, just kind of a blatant sci-fi pump going into the IPO.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Maybe. I will take the other side of that. The other side of this is that it is good to have a long-term vision, even if it is decades away. And that's what mass driver on the moon is. It's not going to be realized this quarter. It's not going to be realized this year. Probably not even this decade. Elon, interestingly, didn't really put a date on it. Did he say something specific?

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  He said, I hope to see it in my lifetime.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, I mean, he's 54, he's got a while, right?

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. If he's a radical life extension guy, he could be like 300 years from now. Who knows? That's a very vague timeline. Where, whereas in the past with point-to-point, with Roadster, with Cybertruck, with space data centers, all the other Elon pitches have been very focused on, we think we can do this in five years. And he always gets criticized for being Elon math, too aggressive. But then history's shown that, you know, he, he over promises, under delivers, but he typically does deliver eventually. And, and if the technology is completely new, no one else was going to build it, and he's the first one to build it, it's fine, because Starlink works. It was the first LEO constellation for satellite internet, had turned into a huge business, wound up being a great technology.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  And so, now the mass driver's a lot crazier. I was going back and forth with Tyler about this, trying to get him to nail down a prediction. We started with 100 years. Do you think it's possible to put a mass driver on the moon in the, in the next 100 years? And you said yes. So it's possible.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  Yes. There's all sorts of qualifications, right? I think the thing. It was like 300 metric tons.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Okay, there was this interesting moment last year when everyone sort of like came around to the same AGI predictions or the same super intelligence prediction saying eight, 10 years, George Hart, Dwar Kesh, Karpathy, Sam Altman. There were a number of people that were all saying in various words, like Sam said, few thousand days. Dwar Kesh had this probability distribution that said 2032. And so everyone was sort of in the, in the seven to 10 year range. And it was just this interesting moment in the AI industry at least where everyone had a clear definition of like what super intelligence would be simultaneously. Everyone was like, yeah, it's not this year. It's, it's more like 10, but there's way like, we are so far away from consensus around mass driver timelines.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  I thought it'd be interesting to start developing thought process around what is a mass driver? What, what does success look like and what are reasonable timelines here? We have to define what an, what a mass driver actually is. In simple terms, it's an electromagnetic launch system fixed on the lunar surface. It converts energy. So you put down some solar panels, you, you take energy, that's the electromagnetic. So you're not putting up fuel and then because that's extra cost, you, once you're there, you can just repeatedly get sunlight, turn that into energy and it's going to successfully accelerate a payload to lunar escape velocity, which is one fifth of Earth's escape velocity. You gotta be going 5,000 miles an hour to escape the moon's gravity well. You have to be going 25,000 miles per hour to escape Earth's.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  So from an efficiency, an energy efficiency standpoint, it's much better to leave from the moon than to leave from Earth. So then the payload needs to go somewhere useful, like you make this thing. In this, in this video, he's talking about making satellites on the moon. That's even farther away, but those have to go somewhere. So you can't just launch them into deep space. I mean, unless you, that's where you're going. Usually you would go to a lunar orbit or an earth orbit or some point in between the moon and Earth.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Dave says, what is this mass driver you speak of SpaceX is getting in the supplements game?

• 10:59John Coogan?

  That's a great name for us.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  They should make a.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  They've done the Tesla Tequila.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. They should make a, a mass gainer that they release now and say, hey, if you buy this, you'll get priority access to the mass driver on the moon.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  I like this. I like this a lot. I would definitely be a daily driver of the mass driver. And so that, yeah, there's this question of like, you, you set up this thing that's going to take forever, be really expensive. What are you actually pushing into space? You probably start with basic materials. So rock, literally rocks, metal, oxygen, water. A lot of useful space.

• 11:31Jordi Hays?

  What if the asteroids that we get into our atmosphere is just an advanced civilization somewhere else? Just.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Mass driving?

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Mass driving.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  We're like, yeah, we're, we're downrange, guys. Relax.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  I saw a hilarious take that the first UFO that will arrive on Earth will just be a car guy from another galaxy who like got into building a crazy, you know, supercars effectively.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  Taking it out on a cruise.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  You can't get to Earth in that thing. That's too modded. That's too crazy. You're not, yeah, you're going to break down. There's no way. And he's like, I'll show.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  You're going to be too old by the time you get there.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  I'll show you. I've modded this thing. You can also potentially get propellant from the moon. If you can extract water from, from ice from the moon, especially near the poles, that water can support people because you can drink it. Here are the four conditions I think need to be met in order to say, yes, we have a working mass driver on the moon. This is how I'd formulate this bet with Tyler Cosgrove over there. One, you need a permanently installed electromagnetic launcher, and it has to be on the lunar surface. This should be obvious. Two, it has to launch at least 300 metric tons over a 12-month period. This means it's driving significant mass, not just test payloads. Let's aim for 95% mission success and at least 200 launches per year.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Failures are going to happen, but we want to get this reliable and at commercial scale, and that means that it can't be breaking down all the time. Lastly, the mass launched from the moon has to actually be put to use. You can't just have this demo unit that's just blasting rocks into the sun. It's got to go to something useful, and that could just be water that's going somewhere else or, or, you know, rocks that are going somewhere else. But it needs to be like, we're catching them somewhere. There's a reason. That it's going there. Once all the, all four of those conditions are met, it will be hard to argue that we're in some sort of demo phase or publicity stunt. How long will this take?

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  You should, you should put the goalposts on the mass driver. The way that you, you keep moving them.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm moving the goalposts on this? I put the over under at like 15 to 20 years, which is about as aggressive as I could get. I think Tyler's gonna take the other side of this.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm gonna take the over.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  You're taking, you're gonna take over 20.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  15 years is, I think, kind of crazy.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  15 years is a blink of an eye.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  I think I have a bit more AGI pill than you, Tyler.

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, let's go through the six steps.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Just say, just say, just say you lost faith.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  The six steps, six steps. Okay, so first off, we gotta get to the moon. We can't really get to the moon right now. We're, we're like, we're pretty close with like really small payloads. We need reliable, heavy lunar launch capacity and that's gonna take some time. So Starship needs to be refueling in orbit, landing on the moon with and without crews, because you're probably gonna need some humans up there, some robots, and we need to start routine cargo flights to the moon. So this is straight up like three to five years away, like minimum. Then you need to build the power infrastructure. So that's another couple of years, because once you're actually going up and back, you have to put down a bunch of solar panels, stored in batteries, and then the batteries need to be able to deliver a lot of power all of a sudden. Now, this is what the Tesla does, right?

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Robotic construction capacity, you got to get autonomous construction rovers at least up and running to lay the electromagnetic track. Then you actually have to build the mass driver on Earth. The good news is that once you build it, once you've built it, like the benefits are really good. Like you don't have an atmosphere, there's no drag, no weather, no air resistance, and of course, gravity's a lot less. So you still need a plan for where the mass goes after it's driven. You gotta catch it, kind of, and that's a whole nother problem. But, and, and when you add all these projects up, you start easily getting into the decades. I mean, if you think about this in like the most grand project you can imagine, which is like the Dyson Sphere, basically, solar panels directly around the

• 15:15John Coogan?

  sun, all the way around the sun to capture all of its energy, you're gonna need to send a lot of solar panels to the sun. Making those on the moon is lower cost potentially than making them on Earth. That's theoretically.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm seeing a tourism angle when the mass driver is pointed back at the Earth to like be in a little like bob sled type thing, a little pod to be launched at the Earth. And then you kind of break through the atmosphere and then you parachute.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  That could be good for like gender reveal birthday parties, you know.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  This needs an Elon-esque figure to accomplish.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm thinking more in that 50, 50 year range.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Over 50 or under 50? We gave Tyler exactly.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  I changed, I'm going 30.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  30? Whoa.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  What change?

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Well, I was just like, AGI is like basically here. There's no way it's going to take that long.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  There we go. There we go.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  It's like everything will be so cheap.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Okay, so you want, do you want 40?

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I was thinking five years.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Five years.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  Had ever to suspended cap.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  What do they have to say? Are they bullish on, is suspended cap bullish on the presentation?

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Terrafab, suspended cap says Terrafab is a blatant pump. It actually disgusts me. There will never be leading edge chips from them. There will never be data centers in space. It's such a blatant effort to IPO SpaceX on the back of some pie in the sky BS and then merge with Tesla, do a humongous raise and keep blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for five years. Not a fan. Decel. Suspended cap's a decel. There was an obituary in the Wall Street Journal for David Simon. He was a mall king who was both feared and admired. He had ruthless negotiation tactics, an obsession with details and the sheer force of will that turned his family's real estate business into the largest mall owner in the country.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  He passed away on Sunday after a cancer diagnosis in 2024. He was 64 years old. During his more than three decades as Simon Property Group's chief executive, the inveterate dealmaker gobbled up competitors and defied critics who said malls were obsolete. Over a decades-long buying spree, he cobbled together an empire that spanned 250 properties and 2,000, or 206 million square feet, giving Simon control of more retail space. than anyone in the world. His success helped propel the family to the wealthiest echelons with an estimated net worth of 11.6 billion, ranking number 38 on Forbes magazine's list of the richest American families. At a time when malls were failing and retailers were filing for bankruptcy, Simon invested

• 17:50John Coogan?

  in his properties, beefed up their luxury offerings, and added non-shopping tenants such as high-end fitness centers, high-tech mini golf courses, and upscale residence. I feel like that has been the secret to success with the modern mall. There's a lot of malls that have sort of mid-tier or low-end retailers where it is actually pretty comparable to shopping online. You go in, there's no one that's really going to talk to you, the stuff's just there, it might be on the floor, it's messy, but then there are certain malls that have leaned into the higher-end experience and, oh, would you like a drink? Let's talk about what you're thinking, let's, you know, show you all this stuff, try this on, and it's much more, it's just in a completely different tier than e-commerce shopping. And so I feel like those properties and those chains have done very well.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Along with partners, he snapped up ailing retailers including Aeropostale, Nautica, Eddie Bauer, JCPenney, Forever 21, Lucky Brand, and Brooks Brothers. The arrangement propped up the chains, prevented large vacancies in Simon malls, and turned out to be moneymakers for the company. Effective Monday, Simon's board appointed Eli Simon, one of David Simon's five children, as its CEO and president. The mall king was both feared and admired, and could be both charming and terrifying. Simon unleashed a tirade at coach executive Todd Kahn during their first meeting in the decade of the 2000s after the handbag maker tried to reneg on deals to open stores in Simon malls. "There was no shortage of profanity," Kahn said. The two came to an agreement and became friends.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Nothing like a screaming match to kick off a lifelong friendship. David's word was his bond. You could have bang-out meetings, but if you came to a resolution and you shook hands, it was golden. That's a good way of doing business.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  R I P to the mall king.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  OpenAI is offering private equity firms guaranteed minimum return of 17.5% as well as early access to models not yet in public release. There was a lot of chatter on the timeline going back and forth, like, is this some sort of weird guarantee? Is this not normal for private equity dealing? Market participant.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Broke it all down.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  To take you through it. So why don't you read through some of this?

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Many are saying OpenAI's $10 billion private equity joint venture is giving a desperate feeling. A lot of people were throwing up the red flag emoji, saying vendor financing dressed up as venture capital guaranteed returns that smell like a Ponzi. A company burning $14 billion this year buying distribution it can't earn organically. I'd push back. TPG, Bain Capital, Advent, and Brookfield put up $4 billion. They get preferred equity with a 17.5% minimum return, board seats, and early access to OpenAI's newest model. OpenAI gets instant distribution into hundreds of portfolio companies, no traditional enterprise sales cycles, no selling company by company. The part people are missing, a huge number of software companies are privately held. Tomo Bravo alone owns 75 software companies generating $30 billion in annual revenue. P E firms collectively did $1.8 trillion

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  in buyouts last year. These companies are shifting to heavy token consumption. A W S knows this. They run a dedicated P E sales function.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Talk about a dream job. That, oh, I would kill for that. Yeah.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you love private equity.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Hard to imagine.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Anything better. Advisory programs, transformation consultants, the whole apparatus. Azure and G C P do the same. OpenAI is running the cloud distribution playbook. Wholesale tokens to P E portfolios at scale. The difference is exclusivity. A W S doesn't ask P E firms to put up $4 billion to take board seats. They give the advisory away. OpenAI is asking for capital commitment, which buys preferential access, dedicated forward deployed engineers, and a financial incentive for the P E firm to actually push adoption across its portfolio. A P E firm that invested $4 billion in this J V isn't running a parallel R F P with Anthropic. That's the point. The 17.5% return looks like a red flag until you look at it closely. It's preferred equity hurdle, not a coupon on debt. This is the main thing that the hundreds

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  of posts I saw are missing. Priority on returns before common shareholders. So it's preferred equity plus a return on top of that.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is buying captive distribution channel into enterprises they'd otherwise spend years trying to reach. Anthropic is running a parallel deal with Blackstone, Hellman, Friedman, and Per Mira. One billion common equity, no guaranteed return, more of a Palantir-style consulting venture. Both companies doing this simultaneously tells you where enterprise AI is heading. The bear case is real. Ninety-five percent of enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver ROI. It's already gone.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's not true anymore, but.

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was one study. And again,

• 22:21John Coogan?

  It was per agent coding.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  Fourteen billion in projected losses this year, profitability not expected until 2021. Nine, all true in OpenAI's enterprise business is already 10 billion of 25 billion in revenue, forty percent and growing to 50% by year end. The distribution problem is what's left to solve.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, goes on and on. But yeah, overall, I think like people are taking one data point out of context, kind of spinning it into something that that looks quite extreme and concerning when in reality is just giving them a preferred return. Financial Times had some reporting Saturday. OpenAI to double workforce as business push intensifies. I love a business push. So this is fantastic news. Matt Slotnick says TBH, the biggest risk to incumbents may be that labs absorb all the top talent. Labs already get great engineering talent, but this will spread to product, sales, marketing, et cetera. When they become the optimal destination to solve the problems of your customers, it's going to get up. Yeah, basically, you know, you have a big enterprise instead of going and doing and trying to figure out like the right SaaS

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  solution for a specific problem, you can go to a lab and get something similar. As part of that workforce push, OpenAI tapped former Meta executive to lead their ad push.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, why is no one talking about Dave Dugan?

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  The Duganator.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Dave Dugan, a former top advertising executive at Meta, is going to lead sales, ad sales. Dugan, who announced earlier this month he was stepping down from his role as Vice President of Global Clients and Agencies at Meta, has been named Vice President of Global Ad Solutions for OpenAI. He will report to Brad.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Lightcap.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  The Lightcapinator.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  The high-profile hire underscores OpenAI's urgent push to generate new revenue streams to support its enormous funding requirements for its computing needs.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  People were complaining that like the advertisers that bought the first ad campaigns on ChatGPT said that the process was low-tech and that they haven't received much data showing if their ads worked. Two executives at agencies working with early ChatGPT advertisers said they haven't yet been able to prove the ads have driven any measurable business out from their outcomes for their clients. Eric Suft over at Mobile Dev Memo shared two thoughts on reporting that early ChatGPT ad campaigns lacked performance data. One, this is to be expected. Any early offering will feature limited functionality. Early adopters should be prepared to fill measurement gaps themselves with polling, you know, or any other sort of pixels or tracking. You should be able to work this together. There's

• 24:55John Coogan?

  been plenty of times, this was the early podcast ads, you know, you'd run a bunch of podcast ads and be like, okay, some people use the coupon code, but a lot of people don't. What multiplier should I apply to that? And then you wind up surveying your customer base and being like, wait, we spent 10% of our marketing budget on podcast ads, but 20% of our customers that they found out about us from a podcast, like, maybe we should spend more there, right? Measuring incredibly asserting performance is precisely what ad agencies are paid to do, says Eric Suft. Says if an ad agency says it can't provide performance data because the channel doesn't provide it, it is merely a media-buying intermediary. If you're an ad agency, you got to figure out whether or not the ads that you pitch to your clients are actually working. Mark Zuckerberg.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  Big scoop.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  From Megan over at The Journal. Mark Zuckerberg is building a CEO agent to help him do his job. Employees are also adopting AI agents and AI tools internally.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Namely, my claw.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  My claw.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  My claw.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  My do.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  And second brain in a bid to speed up work as they get graded on AI use.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, where is our my claw and our second brain?

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Um, yeah, I don't know. I'm so interested to know what, uh, what Mark Zuckerberg is prompting.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  Hope's Revenge says Z Stack?

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, Zuck's Z Stack is like, it's like god mode.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  I mean, it does make sense in his position to have a model that's fine tuned on the internal KPIs, the internal org chart, all this information that's private. And he probably doesn't want to hand that off to another, to another lab that's just gonna maybe look at the data and be like, oh, okay. So Mark Zuckerberg just add, just asked, how do I poach from, from all the other labs? But there's got to be so many other questions that he's asking all the time when, when you're walking into a meeting with executives. You want to know, well, how is this division performing? How much money am I spending on Meta Ray-Ban displays? What's the turn rate? Who are our biggest partners?

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  There's a million questions.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're, we're joking around, but Z Stack does make sense.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  It does make sense.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  You should be able to have god mode.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, this, this has the, there are companies that are starting to do this where they're, they're pitching their agent stacks for CEOs. Boardy is sort of one version of that, right? But there's more and more people that are like, okay, we will come in and, and fine tune something for your organization specifically. Um, and maybe do that on the fly. Maybe that's just chat GPT enterprise or Anthropic enterprise or whatever. But, uh, Zuck clearly wants something built from the ground up. And it's also a great product demo because if it works really well for him, then the lessons and the learnings from there will probably apply to other people in the ecosystem. So the agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster. For instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Zuckerberg's agent project reflects a drive across the 78,000 person company to accelerate the pace of work, eliminate layers from its organizational structure and change the day-to-day jobs of its employees to remain competitive with AI-native startups with much smaller staffs. The company views AI adoption as critical to the future of success. Zuckerberg has been spending more time coding recently. He previewed some of the efforts at the company's earnings call in January. Quote, "We are investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done. We're elevating individual contributors and flattening teams," he said. "If we do this, then I think we're going to get a lot more done, and I think it'll be a lot more fun." I love that. Leave us five stars on Apple

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Podcasts and Spotify. We are now the number two technology show on Spotify. Thank you to everyone who supported us throughout this way. All in. Have a wonderful evening. Massive stream tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific. Send those reactions to this.